
4L 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No. 

Sheltij 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



A NATIONAL CHUECH 



3Sg tfje Same Sutijor: 

The Church Idea: An Essay 

towards Unity, 
The Peace of the Church. 



THE BEDELL LECTURES FOR 1897 



A NATIONAL CHURCH 



BY / 
/ 

WILLIAM REED HUNTINGTON 

KECTOK OF GRACE CHURCH, NEW YOKK 



E Pluribus Unum 




CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1898 ^yryq > «v C--3^V 



*% 



2096 

Copyright, 1897, 

By the Trustees of Kenyon College, 
Gambler, 0. 



J JUt I — '■"" ■ — 



All rights reserved. 



The Library 
Congress 



\v •; •sin^non 



fflfottowitts Sot: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



TO THE 

PRESIDENT AND FACULTY 

OF 

KENYON COLLEGE 

WHAT WAS FIRST SPOKEN IN THEIR HOSPITABLE HEARING 
IS NOW GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. 



CONTENTS. 



The Theory 



PAGE 



II. 



Practicability 



39 



APPENDIX. 



A. Concerning Neutralization of Territory in 

the Region of Sacramental Theology 77 

B. The Place of Temperament in Eeligion . 92 

O. A Bibliography of Irenic Literature, Amer- 
ican and English 100 



I. 

THE THEOEY. 



A NATIONAL CHURCH. 



THE THEORY. 

The philosophy of national Churches deserves an 
ampler discussion than^ it has ever yet received. 
Books in plenty, and very able ones, have been written 
upon the doctrine of the Church as a whole. Special 
"Establishments" of religion, such as the Episcopal 
Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of 
Scotland, have also polemic and irenic literatures of 
their own. But for the national Church pure and 
simple, the national Church considered as an entity, 
existing within and yet in a sense apart from the 
Church universal, while at the same time wholly in- 
dependent of the civil State, — for this we seem still 
to lack any lucid or self-consistent theory. In fact, 
a dispassionate inquirer might well be pardoned were 
he to raise the question, Is such an organism as 
a national Church expedient, even if possible? 

What account did Jesus Christ take of "nations," 
in the ordering of his kingdom, that we should pre- 
sume to parcel out his world-wide realm in accord- 



4 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

ance with the shifting moats and alterable hedges of 
the treaty-makers? 

The local Church we know, the single pastor with 
his flock about him ; the Church Catholic we know, 
"the blessed company of all faithful people": but 
what is this intermediary concept of a national 
Church ? What is it better than a mere geographical 
expression, a name for something that has no sub- 
stantive existence, a ghost of Gallicanism,an ecclesi- 
astical No-man's Land ? These are questions which 
the convinced Congregationalist and the convinced 
Ultramontanist agree in asking. Unless they can be 
met and answered, the advocates of national Churches 
may as well learn to hold their peace ; they are on 
seas where navigation is dangerous, and neither the 
pilot of the barque of Peter nor the helmsman of the 
Mayflower will care a straw for their signals. On 
every account, therefore, it behooves us to be clear 
in our own minds as to what we are purposing to 
consider, and, however disinclined we may feel to 
the formality of definitions, not to attempt to dis- 
cuss national Churches until we shall first have 
come to at least an approximative understanding as 
to what " nations " are. Perhaps some suph state- 
ment as the following will serve us, at least for 
working purposes : A nation is a people organized 
under one civil polity, established upon a definite 
territory, and possessed of sovereign powers. 

We need not deny that to the perfection of 
national life characteristics other than these which 



THE THEORY. 5 

I have named do greatly contribute. As respects 
the fulness and symmetry of their national life, 
some peoples are more blessed than others. It is 
much to be desired, for example, that a nation 
should be "of one language and of one speech; " but 
were we to make this requirement a part of our 
definition, we should rule out of the family of nations 
some of its oldest and strongest members. It is 
much to be desired, also, that a nation should be of 
one blood, one racial stock; but if we were to insist 
upon this point, we should kill the claim of the United 
States to nationality. No, the three all-important 
notes of nationality are those that stand out sharply in 
our definition, — polity, territory, sovereignty ; there 
must be discipline, there must be area, there must be 
independence. How passionately the model nation 
of the former age clung to all three of these posses- 
sions every reader of the Old Testament remembers. 
Their law, their land, their freedom, — these, for the 
Hebrews of the monarchy, made the very essence of 
national life. At the wall of wailing in the modern 
city of Jerusalem, you may to-day see men and 
women lamenting with strong crying and tears the 
loss of these credentials of nationality. When 
Christ came, the Jews had already forfeited one of 
the three essentials, the sovereignty; but they 
still kept hold of the other two, their law and 
their land. They tried hard to persuade themselves 
that they were still a nation, but really they were no 
longer such. Their cry, "We have a law," availed 



6 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

them nothing, so long as it must needs be supple- 
mented by that other cry, "We have no king but 
Csesar. " Sovereignty having been lost, neither law 
nor land, nor both together, could make a nation of 
them. Since then, law, land, and sovereignty all 
have gone ; they are a people still, but they are not 
a nation any more. Whether "Zionism" will make 
them such remains to be seen. 

When the pioneers of Christianity began their 
enterprise, they found themselves, to all intents and 
purposes, face to face with but a single nation, the 
Roman. It was a nation conspicuously lacking in 
those non-essential notes of unity of which I was 
just speaking, oneness of language and oneness of 
blood ; but, all the same, it met the requirements of 
our definition, in that it covered a recognized area, 
the basin of the Mediterranean, was under a single, 
even though variously adapted discipline, and pos- 
sessed a sovereignty not derivative but original. 

The sacred society, the ecclesia, which grew up 
under these conditions, was necessarily national in 
its scope, — not national, as we know, in the sense 
of receiving any formal recognition at the hands of 
the nation's rulers, for, on the contrary, it was 
officially persecuted : but national in the sense that 
it permeated the nation and took possession of it 
from within, as the sap of a tree mounts through the 
trunk until it has infiltrated limb and bough and 
twig and leaf. The Churches founded by St. Paul 
and his companions in different regions of the 



THE THEORY. 7 

Roman Empire were not national Churches at all, 
nor is there any evidence that they regarded them- 
selves as such; there was but one nation, the 
Empire; and the conversion of the Empire brought 
into existence, by necessary process, the first of 
national Churches, the Roman, — not yet the Papal, 
be it observed, but assuredly the Roman. And this 
came about, let us never suffer ourselves to forget, 
by growth rather than by manufacture. It was a 
true genesis, not a forced contrivance. The Emperor 
Constantine did not make the Church national by 
establishing it, he established it because he found 
that by an unobserved process it had already become 
national. It would have continued national even if 
he had not established it, for everywhere through- 
out that whole Roman world it stood rooted at the 
centres of life. 

We come, just at this point, upon one of the most 
striking of the characteristics that difference Chris- 
tianity from Mohammedanism, the Church from 
the Mosque. Islam could carve out caliphates by 
the sword, irrespective of existing civil lines, for 
the plain reason that the sword was Islam's recog- 
nized and acknowledged instrument. But Christ's 
word to the Church is, " Put up thy sword into his 
sheath." The cross is not merely the symbol and 
token of Christianity, it is the implement as well; 
the conquests of the Gospel are conquests of love; 
and hence it follows that instead of creating terri- 
torial jurisdictions, as Islam, at whatever cost of 



8 A NATIONAL CHUECH. 

blood, is eager to do, the Christian Church simply 
accepts the jurisdictions which she finds made ready- 
to her hand, only too thankful to let political geog- 
raphy alone, that she may bend all her energies to 
her proper task of blessing human life. The Church 
is militant, indeed, but her militancy is of the 
spirit, and her sword "bathed in heaven." She is 
content to let the powers that be district the earth 
as they will, and fix the metes and bounds at their 
discretion, if only upon the territory thus delimited 
she be allowed to enter, and to scatter over the ready 
furrows the good seed of the kingdom. 

So far as the things justly and properly denom- 
inated things of Caesar were concerned, primi- 
tive Christianity simply followed the line of least 
resistance; and as a consequence the first national 
Church found itself as perfectly fitted to the national 
administrative scheme as water, when the gate is 
lifted, fits itself to the arterial system of a modern 
city. 

The bearing of all this upon the rise and growth 
of the Papal power it would be superfluous to trace. 
The story has been often told. Happily it is no 
longer necessary for one to prove his loyalty to 
Eeformation principles by vilifying the Pope. The 
argument which Romanists base upon the Petrine 
texts in the Gospels is not so wholly devoid of plausi- 
bility that we must needs take for fools or knaves 
those who have accepted it as sound. It is a start- 
ling thought, but it is difficult for an observant 



THE THEORYo 9 

investigator of the past not to think it, — that it may- 
have pleased Almighty God to make some use of the 
principle of illusion in his education of the race. 
The illusion that the Empire was the world, and that 
its chief ecclesiastic must necessarily be accepted as 
the world's spiritual head, may possibly have had a 
use and a value in its time of which we moderns are 
but ill-provisioned critics. Be that as it may, the 
point I am making holds good, that the early Church, 
both before its establishment by imperial edict, and 
after its establishment (so long as the frontiers of 
the Empire were unbroken), was a national Church, 
not ecumenical at all, or, if ecumenical, ecumenical 
only in the sense in which Rome meant the world, 
and the world meant Rome. 

When the final break-up of the Empire came to 
pass, what had been the nation became the nations; 
and as each of these gradually sphered itself into a 
oneness of its own, the Christianity of each naturally 
took on, or, to speak more accurately, revealed a 
distinctive coloring. A converted people is as sure 
to retain a fractional part of its inborn characteris- 
tics, its constitutional habit, as a converted person 
is. To drive out nature with a club is as impossible 
in the case of races as in the case of individuals. A 
Celtic tribe, converted, and a German tribe, converted, 
did not cease to retain each its Celtic or its German 
traits. This is not in contravention of the truth 
that God has made of one blood all peoples, but 
simply goes to show that the one blood is subject to 



10 A NATIONAL CHUECH. 

some law of differentiation not dissimilar to that 
which endues with varying shades of green the 
leaves of one and the same tree. At any rate, the 
religious mind of the northern nations finally waked 
up to the fact that it had grown out of sympathy 
with the Christianity of the South, and, as a result, 
the Churches of the Reformation came into being, 
each of them national to such extent as circum- 
stances permitted, but no one of them possessed of 
so strong a principle of internal coherence as the 
imperial body from which it had shaken itself loose. 
Meanwhile the old national Church, still centred, 
as before, at Rome, bated no jot of her masterful 
claim ; and in addition to the schismatical tenden- 
cies that disturbed them from within, the Churches 
of the Reformation had also to face the constant 
pressure of proselytizing approaches from without. 
Under these circumstances the philosophy of national 
Churches found breathing a little difficult ; and only 
in a country blessed, like England, with splendid 
isolation, was such an intellectual achievement as 
the immortal " Polity " of Richard Hooker possible. 

Simultaneously with the Reformation movement, 
came the discovery and tentative colonization of the 
two Americas, with the consequent struggle of the 
creeds to gain possession. South America fell to 
the lot of the still vigorous survivor of the old 
national Church of Rome, while North America, 
after many struggles, came to be recognized as the 
fair field without favor, within whose limits the 



THE THEORY. 11 

problem of the non-Roman national Church might 
conceivably, in some distant future, be worked out. 

And thus, after our rapid glance at a far-spreading 
past, we find that we have reached to-day, — to-day 
with all its agitating anxieties and dreads; to-day 
with all its invigorating promise, its invincibility 
of hope. But our having reached to-day in our 
inquiry by no means releases us from the necessity 
of philosophizing; on the contrary, that duty lies 
all the more heavily upon us. Under the condi- 
tions of life in the United States of America, the 
difficult questions of national churchmanship lend 
themselves to discussion with better promise of 
fruitful results than anywhere else in Christendom. 
They mount the great telescopes nowadays in regions 
where the atmosphere is known to be exceptionally 
clear; doubtless we Americans have many motes 
in our sunbeam, but of the particular variety of 
mote known as ecclesiastial prejudice the air has, 
by many rains, been washed clean. Unhampered 
by establishmentarian prejudices, and without the 
slightest fear that the civil power will either lay an 
embargo upon our inquiry or flout us for the con- 
clusions reached, we can work away at our problem 
with a perfectly free hand. There will be time 
enough for dealing with the practical side of the 
subject by and by. For the present the rationale, 
the theory, the why and wherefore of the matter, 
must still detain us. 

For example, there is a concession to be made, 



12 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

and a most important one. We are bound, I think, 
to concede to the Ultramontanist that his conception 
of the Kingdom of Christ as being world-wide in its 
scope and range is, as a conception, far loftier, far 
more soul-inspiring, than what is apparently the 
Nationalist's notion of the thMg. The Nationalist 
can of course appeal and does appeal to the strong 
instincts of patriotism. The enthusiasm which the 
present-day Englishman, for instance, feels for his 
national Church is unquestionably very much mixed 
up with the enthusiasm which he feels for England. 
But it is wonderful how little the New Testament 
has to say about the duty of patriotism. When 
clergymen are minded to preach political sermons, 
they commonly are driven to the books of the Old 
Testament in search of their texts. The polity of 
Jesus Christ is ecumenical, not national. When in 
his character of conqueror He goes forth to war, 
his "far-flung battle-line " reaches to the ends of 
the earth. In the beginnings of his ministry, He 
had, indeed, much to say of a special mission to 
Israel. His language to more than one of the for- 
eigners with whom He was brought in contact had a 
distinctly Hebraic tincture. But as the end draws 
near, the catholic scope of his mission is disclosed. 
"And I, if I be lifted up," He cried, "will draw all 
men unto Me. " 

It was in this sense that Paul, from the outset, 
understood his Master. Language more comprehen- 
sive than St. Paul's with respect to the largeness 



THE THEORY. 13 

of the Kingdom, it would be impossible to frame. 
If he mentions national and race distinctions, it is 
only that he may slur them. No Jacobin or Inter- 
nationalist was ever more intolerant of patriotism, 
in the narrow sense, than he. He valued his Roman 
citizenship, to be sure, for, as a man of sense, he 
was not indifferent to the practical advantages which 
it secured ; but whenever it was seen to be a ques- 
tion of the Kingdom, Scythian and barbarian drew 
upon his sympathies, and challenged his interest as 
powerfully as the best Roman of them all. We must 
therefore, as I said, concede to the Ultramontanist a 
superiority over the Nationalist as touching the aims 
which the two respectively hold up to themselves. 
How, then, are we to avoid the conclusion that it 
is our duty as good Christians, pupils of the New 
Testament rather than of the Old, to forsake 
nationalism altogether, and to follow the Ultramon- 
tanist whithersoever he may lead, even though our 
doing so take us across the mountains, and bring 
us to the city where the man holding the keys sits? 
We cannot avoid that conclusion, save by taking the 
ground that nationalism in religion is a temporary 
expedient, a policy forced upon us by the necessities 
of the present, and destined in due time, unless 
indeed the course of this world be meanwhile inter- 
rupted by the personal coming of the King, to merge 
in the larger ecclesia in which are to be gathered 
all the nations of the earth. The Ultramontanist's 
error is not in claiming a world-wide dominion for 



14 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

the Church,— there he is right; but rather in failing 
to see that the Church of Kome, magnificent as her 
career has been, and deep as our gratitude to her 
must always be, was never, after all, anything but a 
national Church herself, and that hence her attempt 
to administer this modern world which long since 
ceased to be a single nation is an anachronism. If 
at this the Ultramontanist turns upon us, as he is 
very likely to do, with a charge of inconsistency, in 
that we acknowledge the necessarily fragmentary 
and inchoate character of national Churches, but at 
the same time have no scheme to offer for an ecu- 
menical polity that shall be large enough for the 
whole world, our answer is the old one that Moses 
gave to Pharaoh when the king sought to bind him 
down to terms in the matter of the exodus, "We 
know not with what we must serve the Lord until 
we come thither." Even so we Nationalists know 
not precisely what will be the proper ecclesiastical 
framework for "the Federation of the World" until 
we "come thither." Certainly that goal is far 
enough away at present, nor may we hope to see it 
heave in sight until what our Lord, in a most 
suggestive phrase, calls " the times of the Gentiles " 
shall have been fulfilled. 

For the present it is plain that the Sovereign 
Commander of all the world has use for nations; 
and since no one of these nations can interfere in 
the internal affairs of any other one without there 
ensuing a clash of sovereignties, the best that the 



THE THEORY. 15 

Christianity of each nation can do is to orb itself 
into a unity of its own. The Roman Church seeks 
to avoid this difficulty by its device of concordats,— 
solemn treaties, that is to say, negotiated from time 
to time between the papal see and the various govern- 
ments of Christendom, whereby certain rights and 
privileges are guaranteed by the secular to the sacred 
society ; but the fact that it has proved impossible to 
carry out this scheme with anything like symmet- 
rical completeness would seem to be the sufficient 
condemnation of the principle upon which it is based. 
The method of the concordat offers too many oppor- 
tunities for intrigue. It tempts the Church into the 
sins that beset diplomacy. It is only too likely 
to promote a substitution of finesse and adroitness 
for the transparent sincerity which Christ and His 
Apostles twelve commend. 

But it is urged, and with much show of reason, 
that it will not do to intrust the Christian religion 
to the nations in severalty, since there is a danger, 
if we do so, that the substance of the faith may 
suffer wrong, may be depraved in quality or impov- 
erished in quantity. The argument by aid of which 
the Roman Church defends its continued use of the 
Latin tongue for the purposes of worship is this, 
that there would be danger of the liturgy's becoming 
corrupt were it to be translated into the various 
languages of the modern world. The Mass, it is 
urged, might under such circumstances grow to 
mean one thing to one people and another to another. 



16 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

If this reasoning holds good with respect to the 
liturgy, with tenfold force must it apply to dogma. 
" What guarantee have we," asks the Ultramontanist, 
" that the very essence of the faith itself may not be 
at any moment put in jeopardy, if each national 
Church is to be allowed to frame its own doctrinal 
system, lengthen or shorten its creed at will? " 

This raises at once the whole question of the basis 
of authority in matters of religious belief, and brings 
nationalist and infallibilist face to face. 

There was a time when Mother Church could hush 
inquiry, as any mother hushes any child, with a 
"Never mind 'Why?' Believe what I tell you 
because it is I who tell you ; do as I bid you because 
it is I who bid you. " The sixteenth century move- 
ment upset all that, and by a somewhat rough 
process drove the children into inquiring for them- 
selves, not always wisely, though always eagerly, 
as to what the truth might be with regard to the 
foundations of faith. To-day, whether you are un- 
dertaking to tell a man what he ought to believe or 
what he ought to do, he is equally likely to turn on 
you with a peremptory and unceremonious Why ? 
Alike on agenda and on credenda is stamped the 
interrogation mark. 

Just at present the storm-centre happens to be 
immediately over Holy Scripture. We have fallen 
upon times when the well-worn formula, "The 
Bible, and the Bible only, the Religion of Protes- 
tants," scarcely suffices for controversial needs. 



THE THEORY. 17 

The issues of to-day lie back of the Bible, and it 
is no longer possible to silence the inquirer by 
throwing a text at him. Men have raised the ques- 
tion, " What is the Bible ? " and they are discussing 
it in hot earnest. You and I believe that the Bible 
is coming out of the fires stronger than ever, but 
we must not let that belief blind us to our need of 
authoritative guidance in the interpretation of the 
book. The individual mind is not sufficient for 
these things, it must have help. A deep philosophy 
underlay the question with which an ancient Bible- 
student parried the inquiry, " Understandest thou 
what thou readest?" " How can I, except some 
man should guide me ? " 

There are four possible ways of construing the 
promise of Christ that the Spirit should guide the 
disciples into all the truth; we may call them, re- 
spectively, the pietistic, the patristic, the infalli- 
bilist, and the ecumenical. The pietistic theologian 
(and I use the adjective not contemptuously, but 
only with a view to clearness) finds in Christ's 
promise an encouragement to the individual believer 
to count upon ascertaining in every instance the 
true meaning of psalm, parable, and prophecy, if 
only he read his Bible with an honest prayer upon 
his lips for spiritual light. It will scarcely be 
alleged, even by the most ardent devotees of this 
method, that it conduces to corporate unity. They 
are more likely to take the ground that corporate 
unity is a delusion and a snare ; glorying in rather 



18 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

than lamenting over the diversity of result which 
the working out of this theory of interpretation 
brings to pass. Their appeal is to the heavenly 
city, and they are quite content to postpone the ac- 
complishment of any unity, other than an emotional 
one to the celestial calends. 

What the far future is to the pietist, that, as 
respects the secret of outward doctrinal agreement, 
the far past is to the man who stakes everything 
upon the Fathers. For the one the golden age lies 
distantly ahead ; for the other, that blessed era was 
hermetically sealed up centuries ago. If you want 
to know the mind of the Spirit as it was originally 
injected into Holy Scripture, provide yourself with 
a Library of the Fathers (the Benedictine edition is 
the best), and, wholly oblivious to the changes which 
fifty generations of Christian study and Christian dis- 
covery have wrought in the intellectual sky, give 
yourself patiently to the task of disengaging from 
a badly tangled skein the one precious thread of 
unanimous patristic consent. This is what is known 
as the appeal to antiquity. That it has immense 
value as an element in the ascertainment of truth 
only a smatterer in theology will deny. To put it 
forward as the alone all-sufficient organon is to court 
discomfiture. 

The retroactive influence which too much harping 
upon this single string, "antiquity," exerted over 
the mind of a well-remembered ecclesiastic of our 
day had much to do with bringing to a head the 



THE THEORY. 19 

third of the four great theories, — the infallibilist. 
Henry Edward, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, 
had heard so much, while an Anglican, about the 
authority of the Fathers, that he had grown into 
that mood of mind which prompted Coleridge in an 
impatient moment to cry out, " Evidences of Chris- 
tianity, I am weary of the word." Manning grew 
weary of " antiquity. " He had the eye to see that 
there were a good many anxious questions floating 
about in the modern atmosphere which the Fathers, 
whether Ante-Nicene or Post-Nicene, had never so 
much as touched with the tips of their fingers ; and 
it was deeply borne in upon his mind that it would 
be an immense relief to see established somewhere 
— and if somewhere, where so appropriately as at 
Rome ? — an oracle of present-day truth to which 
discouraged seekers might resort with confidence. 
Aided by others like-minded with himself, he brought 
to pass, in the memorable year of our Lord 1870, the 
enactment by the Vatican Council of a constitu- 
tion the most significant passage of which reads as 
follows : — ■ 

" The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that 
is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of 
all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic author- 
ity he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to 
be held by the universal Church, is, through the divine 
assistance promised him in blessed Peter, possessed of 
that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed 
that his Church should be endowed in defining doctrine 



20 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

about faith and morals, and therefore such definitions of 
the Eoman pontiff are irreformable of themselves and 
not from the consent of the Church." x 

The facts with regard to the passing of this resolve 
are these : The whole number of prelates entitled to 
take part in the proceedings of the Council was one 
thousand and thirty-seven. Of these the largest 
number present at any one session was seven hun- 
dred and twenty-seven. At the first ballot, which 
was held on the thirteenth day of July, six hundred 
and one members were present. Of these four hun- 
dred and fifty-one voted Aye, eighty-eight Nay, and 
sixty-two Placet juxta modum, or " Aye, with quali- 
fications." At the solemn session, or, as we should 
call it, the "formal ballot," on the eighteenth day 
of July, when the final vote was taken, five hundred 
and thirty-five prelates participated, of whom five 
hundred and thirty-three voted Placet, and two Non 
placet. The two dissenters subsequently gave in 
their adhesion. From these figures it appears that 
on the occasion when the balloting was entirely 
unbiassed, that is to say, at the session of July the 
thirteenth, those who voted Placet had a majority 

1 " Romanum Pontificem, cum ex Cathedra loquitur, id est cum omnium 
Christianorum pastoris et doctoris munere fungens pro suprema sua Apos- 
tolica auctoritate doctrinam de fide vel moribus ab universa ecclesia tenen- 
dam definit, per assistentiam divinam, ipsi in beato Petro promissam, ea 
infallibilitate poller e, qua divinus Redemptor Ecclesiam suam in definima 
doctrina de fide vel moribus instructam esse voluit ; ideoque ejusmodi Ro- 
mani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesioz irre- 
formabiles esse." — Constitute Dogmat. Prima. Cap. IV. 



THE THEORY. 21 

of one hundred and fifty out of a total of six hundred 
and one present and voting, although they were less 
numerous by five hundred and eighty-six than the 
whole number entitled to attend the Council. With 
this hollow show of unanimity was promulgated the 
most momentous decree of modern times. It is said 
that during that solemn hour a heavy storm passed 
over the city where the Council was assembled, dark- 
ening the spaces of the great church, and punctuat- 
ing the decree with thunder-peals. Can we wonder 
that the omen should have been variously inter- 
preted, — that some should have been quick to say, 
" It is the voice of an angel, " while others murmured 
beneath their breath, "It is the Non placet of 
Almighty God"? 

Time will show which augury was true, and which 
was false. For there is but one pair of alternatives. 
The papal claim to be, in the last resort, the sole 
arbiter of the things that most concern our peace is 
either just or unjust; it is quite impossible that it 
should be both. If Jesus Christ really speaks by 
Leo, to Leo we must go. If, on the other hand, the 
decree of July was but the capstone of an edifice 
already undermined, and doomed as soon as finished 
to vanish away, nothing so much behooves us as to 
find a basis of authority not liable to shock, some 
floor broad enough and strong enough for the nations 
to build upon it and be safe. 

In what I have further to say, my endeavor will 
be to show that we have such a foundation. A phi- 



22 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

losophy there is which at once strikes deeper than 
the pietistic and stretches farther than the patristic 
theory. It recognizes and allows for an important 
element of truth in each of these others, while it 
superadds an increment of value which is all its own. 
I have called it, for lack of a better name, the ecu- 
menical philosophy of authority. It is a philosophy 
adherence to which will save a national Church from 
lapsing into provincialism, while at the same time 
safeguarding it from the encroachments of any 
alleged Mother and Mistress of all Churches. 

This philosophy is summed up in the brief maxim 
of St. Augustine, which Cardinal Newman has made 
famous, Securus judicat orbis terrarum. In that 
most instructive of all autobiographies, " The History 
of my Religious Opinions," better known under its 
first title, Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman gives us 
a graphic account of the manner in which that sono- 
rous sentence of the great Latin Father broke on 
his conscience like a revelation. He calls them 
"palmary words." They kept ringing in his ears. 
He found himself repeating them again and again. 
" The words of St. Augustine, " he says, " struck me 
with a power which I had never felt from any words 
before. To take a familiar instance, they were like 
the ' Turn again, Whittington, ' of the chime ; or, to 
take a more serious one, they were like the ' Tolle, 
lege, — Tolle, lege, ' of the child which converted 
St. Augustine himself. Securus judicat orbis ter- 
rarum. By those great words of the ancient Father, 



THE THEORY. 23 

interpreting and summing up the long and varied 
course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the 
Via Media was absolutely pulverized. " 1 

How little did the proud, eager, passionate soul 
of John Henry Newman dream that in less than six 
years after the making of this frank disclosure of 
the chief reason that had carried him to Rome, he 
would himself be called upon to accept, at the very 
point of the sword, as we may say, a doctrine of 
religious certitude the very opposite of the one he 
here so eloquently sets forth. He turned his face 
Homeward because he had become convinced that 
England was in isolation, and that only the voice of 
the Church Catholic (for so he translated Augustine's 
orbis terrarum) could be trusted; but he had not 
been long housed in his new spiritual home before 
he was informed that not at the lips of the orbis 
terrarum at all, but rather at the lips of a single 
ecclesiastic enthroned at the capital of a dead em- 
pire, he was thenceforth to drink in truth. It was 
like being called upon to exchange the voice of many 
waters for the piping of a phonograph, — an instru- 
ment which only reproduces words that have been 
put into it. Can we wonder that in a hasty moment, 
as he saw the evil day approaching, he should have 
characterized as " an insolent faction " the people 
who were moving sea and land to bring about the 
definition of the new dogma ? 

The late Dean Stanley is credited with the epi- 

1 Apologia pro Vita Sua, p. 118, Am. ed. 



24 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

grammatic remark, "How differently might the 
history of the Church of England have read if 
Dr. Newman had only understood German ! " An 
American Christian may be pardoned for adding, 
"How differently might Dr. Newman have trans- 
lated Augustine's Securus judicat orbis terrarum 
had he once put the Atlantic between himself and 
the Europe of his studies ! " For truly the orbis 
terrarum has become a different thing from what 
it was in the day when the son of Monica looked out 
upon it and put his trust in its judgment. But his 
argument has lost nothing of its strength; on the 
contrary, it has been found to possess a cumulative 
value, gaining in force from century to century as 
man becomes more and more aware of the largeness 
of the plans of God. The world of Augustine's time 
was a " round world, " in the sense in which a circle 
is round, — there was doubt as to its circumference, 
but practically no doubt as to its centre ; our round 
world is round in the sense in which a globe is 
round, — we are certain of its circumference, but no 
spot upon its surface can claim to be an exclusive 
centre any longer ; and yet by so much as a sphere 
is better than a surface, by that much is the argu- 
ment from general consent, which is what the Securus 
judicat orbis terrarum really means, stronger to-day 
than it ever was. It has been to our advantage, not 
our loss, that "umbilical" and "ecumenical" have 
ceased to be convertible terms. 

But let us not dwell in parables. The thesis I 



THE THEORY. 25 

seek to maintain, as the point most central to an 
ecumenical philosophy of authority in the region of 
religious belief, is this, that Christ's promise 1 of the 
guidance of the Spirit runs to the Church as a whole, 
to the ecclesia diffusa, and is self-registering from 
age to age. This is not a theory which will satisfy 
precise minds that must have everything cut and 
dried, and cannot believe that God will ever do a 
new thing unless they personally shall have been 
informed as to the when and where of the birth; 
but possibly it may commend itself to those who, 
patiently pondering in a docile temper the general 
drift of things, have learned to account deliberate- 
ness one of the most infallible notes of divinity. 

In effect, this was the method by which the two 
burning questions of the early Church — the question 
of the canon of Holy Scripture and the question of 
the limits of the catholic Creed — were settled. The 
Councils which dealt with these questions did but 
gather to a head and put into more definite shape 
what was generally held among the faithful to be the 
truth of the matter. The Bishops were representa- 
tive men, who came together, not for the purpose of 
concocting anything of their own, but simply to 
report what it was that in their several neighbor- 
hoods was commonly believed. This is the way 
St. Luke puts it in the Preface to his Gospel. 
Others, he says, have written their narratives con- 
cerning those matters which have been fully estab- 
lished, and now he proposes to add his. 

1 St. John xvi. 13. 



26 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

Really it was the steady, unnoticed, pervasive 
action of the ecclesia diffusa, in a word, the general 
belief, the public opinion of the early Church, which 
settled both the Canon and the Creed. This public 
opinion found a mouthpiece in Councils, but it 
existed before the Councils were convened, and was 
the implicit even before it had become the explicit 
belief of the Church. This is in line with what the 
best theologians have always held with respect to 
General Councils ; namely, that they ought not to be 
accounted " general " until there has been time enough 
to ascertain whether their findings be acceptable to 
the Church at large. The Church, not the Council, 
is the Spirit-bearing body ; it is to the whole Church 
rather than to its representative assembly that the 
promise of guidance runs; and although Councils are 
of the greatest value as a means of ascertaining what 
the mind of the Church is, nevertheless, if it be 
made afterwards perfectly plain by the course of 
events, that any Council, instead of having fairly 
represented, did really misrepresent the actual mind 
of the Church with respect to some disputed point, 
that Council must be content to go into history with 
a black mark against its name. This is really very 
High Church doctrine, although the fact that I am 
assigning so much importance to the rank and file 
of the Christian body, and comparatively so little to 
the official portion of it, may blind the eyes of some 
to the true character of my contention. 

Assuredly it is no slight or cheap prerogative that 



THE THEORY. 27 

one claims for the Church Catholic when he sets it 
up as the umpire and teacher of the human race, 
maintaining, as I am seeking to maintain, that its 
united testimony with respect to any matter of faith 
or morals comes nearer to an infallible utterance 
than any other voice which it is given to man to 
hear. The saints shall judge the world. 

Do you complain that the doctrine is shadowy 
and nebulous as compared with the crisp and handy 
formula of the Vatican Council? No doubt it is 
open to that charge ; and probably no single incen- 
tive to the promulgation of the infallibility dogma 
was more powerful than the desire to cut short debate 
over disputes which refused to be settled other than 
by the old and wearisome process of simmering and 
simmering until the public opinion of the Church at 
large should confess itself content. It was like the 
introduction of the parliamentary device known as 
the closure, or a moving of "the previous question" 
in an assembly sick and weary of the prolixities of 
debate. But if it be true, and the wise and good 
assure us it is, that things are never settled until 
they are settled right, the slow way may prove the 
better way, in fact, the only way. " Closure " and 
" previous question " are all very well, where it is a 
matter of adjourning and going home to luncheon; 
but for the purposes of such legislation as is expected 
to survive and to endure, nothing is one half so good 
as " general consent, " even if it has to be waited for 
with long patience, like the early and the latter rain. 



28 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

But " nebulous " and " shadowy " are not the only- 
epithets of dispraise which the ecumenical theory of 
authority is likely to draw to itself. It will be called 
foolhardy and hare-brained, because of its seeming to 
launch a very precious freight upon a most tenuous 
and impalpable medium, — an iron-clad, for instance, 
upon a sea of vapor which only simulates the great 
deep. But even so, there is still the question, What 
is Almighty God's own method of launching? 

Foolhardy, indeed, at its first announcement, must 
have seemed that theory of the heavenly mechanics 
which knocked all visible supports from under sun 
and moon and planets, leaving them, one and all, bal- 
anced apparently on nothing. 

We think otherwise to-day, for we have learned 
that the all-pervasive, everywhere energizing force 
which really holds the stars to their courses, is a far 
better guarantee of order, a far more trustworthy 
underpinning than any celestial trestle-work, whether 
of steel or adamant. Surely, what gravitation does 
for stars the eternal Spirit may be counted upon to do 
for souls, holding them invisibly to a unity in the 
truth which no mechanical device of ecclesiasticism 
such as the dogma of 1870 possibly can produce. 

" God builds on liquid air ; " the beams of his cham- 
bers are laid on ocean's unstable floor ; yet is there 
no sub-structure so secure as his, for He hath founded 
it upon the seas and established it upon the floods. 
Poor Simon Peter, like his putative successor, Pio 
Nono, was unequal to this conception of what firm 



THE THEORY. 29 

footing means. He, too, was struck with a sudden 
panic as to this question of support from underneath. 
Beginning to sink, he cried, " Lord, save me." How 
gentle but how searching Christ's lesson in the first 
principles of certitude, " thou of little faith, where- 
fore didst thou doubt ? " 

Again, it will be said that this ecumenical theory 
of authority never can compete with Vaticanism, be- 
cause what is wanted is a court of immediate resort. 
Eome is accessible, we are acquainted with its lati- 
tude and longitude, we know its place upon the map, 
and we can journey thither with our hard questions 
any day we will ; whereas the twenty-first century is 
a long way off, and none of us can hope to live to see 
the day when by patient brooding over the mind of 
the Church the Holy Spirit of Truth shall have 
brought to pass general consent as to the doubts and 
difficulties that now so grievously oppress us. But 
has Ultramontanism as a matter of fact the superi- 
ority in this respect that is claimed for it ? Can 
answers be extracted from the oracle at Eome as 
promptly as the vulgar suppose ? What is the ad- 
vantage of a rapid-firing gun if one never fires it? 
Since the promulgation of the Vatican decree, the 
Roman Pontiff has written a number of letters to the 
world, embracing, in all, many hundreds of proposi- 
tions ; but it does not appear that infallibility is 
claimed for any single one of these propositions, inas- 
much as the letters containing them are not known 
to have been issued ex cathedra, — in accordance, that 



30 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

is to say, with the conditions which the dogma of 
1870 itself lays down as necessary to the putting 
forth of an inerrant utterance. 

While, therefore, the letters are plainly valuable 
on account of the large measure of wholesome and 
timely truth which they contain, they do not essen- 
tially differ in character from letters of counsel that 
reach us from other ecclesiastical sources, as, for ex- 
ample, the mild pastoral set forth by the recent 
Anglican Conference at Lambeth. In fact, it seems 
probable that the Holy See, under the new constitu- 
tion, will never commit itself irrevocably to either 
side of any momentous controversy, whether ecclesi- 
astical, theological, or social, until the straw shall 
have been thoroughly thrashed out, and a practical 
unanimity, at least within the Roman Communion, 
already reached. It need not, therefore, necessarily 
be conceded to the Ultramontanists that their theory 
has even the poor advantage of celerity in its favor. 
Appeal still lies with them, as with us, to the next 
age. 1 

1 " I know well that the decree in question is capable of many inter- 
pretations. There is a sense in which it expresses, I will not say a 
truth, but even a truism. When the Pope speaks as the representative 
of the Church, he cannot but speak truly. I grant it. The question 
is, When does the Pope speak as the representative of the Church? 
A Roman Catholic of my acquaintance ventured to talk to Leo XIII. 
about this dogma, and the obstacle which it presented to reunion be- 
tween England and him. The Pope was distressed, and said that the 
dogma must be explained. . . . ' The truth/ he said, pointing to his 
own breast, ' is not in me but in the Church/ He needed, he said, to 
take the proper means to find out the truth, before he could pronounce. 



THE THEORY. 31 

And, after all, why should we fret against the fact 
that under any system time must always be an im- 
portant element in the task of ascertaining truth ? 
How was the slavery question finally settled in Chris- 
tendom ? Certainly not by the vote of any ecclesias- 
tical Council ; certainly not by the formal decree of 
any Pope : it was settled by a slow process in which 
orators, divines, jurists, story- writers, and soldiers, all 
of them had part. The Spirit of Truth certainly did 
not make the Bishops and Clergy the only instruments 
in this vast work, but all estates of men in God's holy 
Church, from the highest to the lowest, bore severally 
their parts. It was the Christian Orbis Terrarum 
exercising its high right of giving final judgment. 

This is an ethical illustration. A theological one 
would be equally to the point. How has the question 
of the six days of creation been settled, and from 
having been an open become a closed one ? Has it 
been by conciliar vote ? No. Has it been by papal 
bull ? No. How then ? By general consent. Gradu- 
ally the truth with respect to questions that have 
been long vexed gets into the atmosphere, and the 
Church finds herself saying, " Whereas I was blind, 
now I see." Christians believe that this slow but 
sure illuminating process is the work of the Spirit of 
Truth ; that it is in fulfilment of a definite promise 
made by the incarnate Son of God ; and they account 

It was a very true sentiment ; but if it is true, then the practical value 
of the dogma is gone/' — Mason's Principles of Ecclesiastical Unity, 
p. 112. 



32 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

for the more swift advance of the Christianized as 
compared with the non- Christianized peoples of the 
world, by alleging this cause. 

I have endeavored to show that in the all-impor- 
tant region of faith and doctrine, it is possible for a 
national Church, however it may be limited in other 
directions, to hold ecumenical ground. I have laid 
the main stress here, because without a clear phi- 
losophy of authority back of it a national Church can 
neither understand itself nor justify itself. It may 
seem to some that the argument has been unduly 
labored, and that I might safely have treated the 
newly formulated papal claim as a negligible quantity. 

Others, however, will perhaps agree with me in 
thinking that the world has not yet begun to appre- 
ciate the full significance of what was effected under 
St. Peter's dome in 1870. In religious controversy, 
definiteness counts for very, very much. Devout 
minds, especially the minds of devout women (and 
we must remember that the interests of religion are 
largely in the custody of women), yield readily to the 
fascination of a sufficiently emphatic " Thus saith 
the Lord." Logical and scientific difficulties such as 
those suggested by the dogma of transubstantiation ; 
questions of historical accuracy like those that en- 
cumber the Petrine claim ; even ethical misgivings 
prompted by the abuses of the Confessional, the doc- 
trine of indulgences, and the cultus of the saints, — 
will all of them sometimes fade swiftly away in the 
face of the strong assertion, " Rome has spoken ; the 



THE THEORY. 33 

case is closed." In this world of dimmed eyes and 
wayward wills, absolutism has a charm all its own. 
The Roman Empire dies hard. It is a flippant mind 
that can lightly cast ridicule upon the Holy Father's 
tremendous claim. Some of the keenest thinkers of 
our day, men not easily fooled, have succumbed to 
the magic of it. 

So ardent, in deep natures, is the longing for the 
full assurance of downright conviction, so quenchless 
the thirst for certitude, that the mere spectacle of a 
venerable teacher who demands assent to what he 
says on the plea of a divine right is of itself eloquent 
with persuasion. Almost any harbor that offers an- 
chorage is grateful to storm-beaten and half-ship- 
wrecked men. 

" Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar ; 
Oh, rest ye, brother-mariners, we will not wander more.'' 

The struggle which culminated in the Roman Com- 
munion in 1870 is the old struggle between central- 
ization and that genuine catholicity which would 
render to every member of the vast body its due. 
In civil society the contention has gone on under the 
style, Monarch versus People ; in the spiritual society 
under the style, Pope versus Council. The plea I 
have been making is identical, though put forward 
under a somewhat altered form, with that by which 
the great politicians of the Church of England have 
stood fast ever since Trent. The appeal of England 

3 



34 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

was, in a sense, an appeal to antiquity, in that it 
insisted on Holy Scripture and the primitive Creeds 
as the all-sufficient reservoir of revealed truth; but 
that appeal had also in it, be it noted, a present-day 
element, in that it made petition for a fair and truly 
representative General Council, so constituted as to 
do full justice (as for obvious reasons Trent could not 
do) to all the interests of Christendom. 

In the supreme position assigned to Holy Scripture 
and the Creeds, the pietistic and the patristic schools 
have found, and rightly enough, their stronghold ; 
while in the demand for the fair General Council 
there has lain latent all along that recognition of our 
need of a present-day interpretative voice which, as I 
have sought to show, only the common consent of the 
best minds and hearts of Christendom can be counted 
upon to meet and satisfy. " I read," said the late Sir 
John Seeley, " the Bible and the Times." 

It is certainly among things conceivable — who 
shall say that it is not ? — that God in his providence 
may be preparing the way for a General Council of 
Christendom that shall be truly such. If a Parlia- 
ment of Religions is possible, surely a gathering rep- 
resentative of Christendom ought not to be impossible. 
It may be that the convening of such a Council will 
prove itself the ripest outcome of, and the worthiest 
employment for, the marvellous facilities for inter- 
course which modern inventiveness — the child, be it 
observed, of Christian faith — has made ready. Curi- 
ously enough, these new-fangled contrivances lend 



THE THEORY. 35 

themselves with almost equal readiness and efficiency 
to both of the two philosophies of authority we have 
been studying. On the one hand, telegraph and tele- 
phone may be so employed as to turn the Vatican 
into a veritable " Ear of Dionysius," where shall be 
audible whisperings from every remotest corner of 
the Pontiff's world-wide realm ; while, on the other 
hand, transcontinental railroads and the great ocean- 
liners have brought the ends of the earth so close 
together that never, since the days when James of 
Jerusalem could convene the Church at a few hours' 
notice, have the physical difficulties in the way of 
assembling a truly Ecumenical Council been so few 
as they are now. Perhaps there was more of literal- 
ness in John the Baptist's prophecy than has com- 
monly been supposed ; and perhaps all this filling up 
of valleys, levelling of hills, and general shortening 
and straightening of paths and ways may have for its 
chief object that drawing together of the scattered 
family of man which is destined to make government 
by " general consent," or, as they called it on the day 
of Pentecost, " one accord," a more practicable thing 
than government by edict and emissary, rescript and 
concordat. 

I speak of what is far away ; but meanwhile, and 
pending time's answer — nay, let us rather say God's 
answer — to the appeal of the Protestant peoples for 
a fair hearing in council assembled, surely our best 
interpreter, alike of Holy Scripture and of current 
events, is that communis sensus of the Church Uni- 



36 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

versal which somehow we contrive to get at, if only 
we are patient, and from which there is seldom, if 
ever, any going back. One of the oldest of Greek 
proverbs says that " the half is greater than the 
whole." Would you be a good Catholic ? Be a good 
Nationalist first. The rest will come in time. 



II. 

PRACTIBILITY. 



II 

PRACTICABILITY. 

From the philosophical, we pass to the practical 
aspects of national churchmanship, as these disclose 
themselves in our own land. 

The moment we do this, we are confronted by a 
startling spectacle, — a vision which seems to negative 
all hope ; which looks to be, so far as any prospect of 
unity is concerned, a veritable apocalypse of despair. 
I know of no book which an intelligent American 
who is both a lover of his country and a believer in 
the teachings of Jesus Christ, is under a more solemn 
obligation to study than that volume of the United 
States Census of 1890 which deals with the statistics 
of religion. 1 Aside from all ecclesiastical interests, 
the work is worthy of attention on its own merits. 
Merely as a sociological achievement, it ranks with 
such monumental achievements as Charles Booth's 
Enquiry into the Industrial Condition of the London 
Poor. 

Whether as respects ingenuity of method, fairness 
of treatment, or thoroughness of detail, Dr. Carroll's 

1 Conveniently summarized in The Religious Forces of the United 
States. By H. K. Carroll, LL.D., in charge of the Division of Churches, 
Eleventh Census. New York : The Christian Literature Co. 



40 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

conduct of the exceedingly delicate task intrusted to 
him has been beyond praise. It is doubtful whether 
in any language there exists a conspectus of the 
religious statistics of a people so complete as that 
which he and his able helpers have succeeded in 
putting before us. In English there is nothing that 
approaches it. Not only are the figures with respect to 
denominational strength marshalled and re-marshalled 
in almost all possible combinations ; not only are we 
told all there is to be known as to number of com- 
municants, number of clergy, number of church edi- 
fices, value of property, and the like ; but by a most 
suggestive, I had almost said amusing, employment of 
graphic symbols, the condition of things, both in the 
Union as a whole and in the separate States, is made 
vividly evident to the eye. We look, for instance, at 
a circle entitled Maryland (I choose my example at 
random), and we find it divided by radii into eight 
sectors, each with a color of its own, and variously 
named as follows : " Catholic," " Methodist," " Lu- 
theran," " Episcopalian," " Baptist," " Presbyterian," 
" Reformed," " All Other," — the " All Other " sector 
being in the case of this particular State, Maryland, 
about one-thirteenth portion of the whole area of the 
circle, while the Catholic and the Methodist sectors 
cover, each of them, about one-third of the space en- 
closed. If, again, we take the case of Ohio, we see the 
circle divided into nine sectors, entitled respectively : 
" Catholic," " Methodist," " Presbyterian," " Lu- 
theran," " Baptist," " Disciples of Christ," " United 



PRACTICABILITY. 41 

Brethren/' « Reformed/' " All Other." In this circle 
the " Catholic w sector covers one-quarter of the area, 
instead of one-third as in the case of Maryland ; the 
" Methodist " sector suffers similar shrinkage ; the 
" Baptist " sector (and, by the way, how admirably 
this word "sector" seems to harmonize with the 
whole business ! ) remains about what it was in the 
older State, while the " Episcopalian " sector suffers 
the mortification of being merged in the sad promis- 
cuity of the quadrant known as " All Other." If, now, 
we pass Mason and Dixon's line and go down into the 
Gulf States, we find in the case of Georgia a circle 
with only three sectors, respectively entitled " Bap- 
tist," " Methodist," and " All Other." This is balanced, 
and more than balanced, at the far West, by New 
Mexico, where the u All Other " sector covers only one- 
fourteenth portion of the area, the entire remainder 
of the circle being marked " Catholic." 

Among the most interesting circles by way of 
suggestion and reminiscence are Massachusetts and 
Virginia ; Massachusetts, the Puritan Commonwealth, 
showing a space of two-thirds marked " Catholic," and 
another of one-tenth marked " Congregationalist ; " 
while in the home of the Cavaliers we have one full 
half " Baptist," one full quarter " Methodist," and a 
little less than one-twentieth " Episcopalian." If, last 
of all, we turn our attention to the great circle which 
represents the entire Republic, we note that the 
" Catholic " sector covers a little more than one- 
third of the whole area, the " Methodist " a little 



42 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

more than one-fourth, the " Baptist " something less 
than one-fifth, the u Presbyterian " about one-fifteenth, 
and the " Protestant Episcopalian " almost exactly 
one thirty-ninth. 

But this is a cheerful showing for unity compared 
with what we have to face when we turn from the 
graphic method of circles to the numerical method of 
tables. In the device of the circle all kinds of Pres- 
byterians are massed in a single sector, and all kinds 
of Methodists in another single sector, and all kinds 
of Baptists in another single sector ; but as a matter of 
fact there are twelve different denominations of Pres- 
byterians, thirteen varieties of Baptists, and seventeen 
sorts of Methodists. 

In the case of the circles, the cumulative in contrast 
with the particularist method was forced upon Dr. 
Carroll by the exigencies of the situation ; for had he 
undertaken to intersect the sectors by radii numerous 
enough to represent all of these distinctions, and the 
sub-dichotomies covered by the vague phrase " All 
Other" as well, the eye of the student would have 
been hopelessly confused and the intent of the graphic 
device defeated. Moreover, in the matter of tints and 
shading, chromo-lithography would have been utterly 
unequal to the task. 

But let us face the worst at once, The tables show 
that there are in the United States one hundred and 
forty-three distinct religious denominations. It should 
be noted, however, that this generous figure includes 
Jews, Theosophists, Ethical Culturists, and some thirty 



PRACTICABILITY. 43 

organizations that number fewer than one thousand 
adherents apiece. Of professedly Christian denomi- 
nations claiming, severally, upwards of ten thousand 
members, there are sixty-three, ranging from the Roman 
Catholics with their six millions to the Danish Lu- 
therans with their ten thousand one hundred and 
eighty-one. The scandal of the situation is somewhat 
further relieved, when we find, as we do find if we 
look into the matter, that the most of these organiza- 
tions fall easily into families, the bond of kinship 
being either a common doctrine or a common polity. 

If we classify the denominations according to this 
affinity-scheme, as we may call it, and agree to recog- 
nize as important only such families as lay claim to a 
quarter of a million of members, we shall find that we 
have reduced the number of our varieties to ten, which 
ten comprise almost, if not quite, nineteen-twentieths 
of all communicants, of whatever name, within our 
borders. 

So, then, here lies the practical question with which 
we have to grapple : Is there discoverable any per- 
suasive or conciliatory method of bringing these ten 
types of Christian life and thought, these ten tribes 
as we may call them, into such a relation with one 
another, that as Americans we may look forward not 
merely to a retention of our common Christianity, but 
to the gradual emergence of a national Church really 
worthy of the name ? At first we are disposed to say, 
44 No. These great buildings scare us." Great build- 
ings always do have a tendency to enslave the imagi- 



44 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

nation. And yet, I confess, I can think of no loftier 
employment for the ecclesiastical mind, nay, for the 
patriotic mind, of the coming century than a thorough 
study of this question would afford. 

Surely the time has come for a turn of the tide. 
The reductio ad absurdum of sectarianism, as a philos- 
ophy of Christianity, is complete. It has been wittily 
said 1 that the Kansas farmer of to-day, when the crops 
fail, instead of trying, as his father would have done, 
to improve the quality or the quantity of the fertilizers, 
lets his hair grow long and starts a new political party ; 
but few indeed are they who, with our present light, 
would dream of seeking to improve the ratio of wheat 
to tares in our American harvest field by organizing 
to-morrow a new split. As a people we have ceased 
to believe any longer in sectarianism ; but the task of 
doing away with the thing, now that it has been saddled 
upon us, looms so large as almost to incapacitate us 
for effort. 2 We see clearly enough that this jumble of 
fragments has no proper claim to be called a national 
Church, and yet we have mournfully to confess that, 
taken in its entirety, it is the nearest approach to a 
national Church that we can show. 

1 By Professor Peck, of Columbia University. 

2 " There can be no doubt that the reason why many minds abandon 
the doctrine of unity, as it was believed by Christendom for fifteen 
hundred years, is that they are at a loss how to square it with the anoma- 
lies of the last three centuries. But for the unhappy rending of the 
Western Church, no man would have any more dreamed of gainsaying 
the mystery of the visible Church than of the visible sacraments. Men's 
minds have been bribed by their wishes, or perplexed by their difficul- 
ties, into lower and looser conceptions of unity." — Manning's Unity of 
the Church, p. 302, Am. ed. 



PRACTICABILITY. 45 

Almost all are ready to admit that we have had dis- 
integration enough, and that what we want now is 
construction. The thing that takes the heart out of 
us is the immensity of the undertaking. We feel as 
a tribe of savages might feel if shown the " Teutonic " 
or the " Campania," and told to substitute that type 
of boat for their dug-outs and canoes. And yet the 
ocean liner is but the final term in a long process of 
evolution from the dug-out. With God all things are 
possible ; and with man, God helping him, more things 
are possible than we dare dream. 

Weary of squabbles over tariffs and inter-state com- 
merce acts, we need in this country the inspiration of 
some splendid purpose. It may be asked, has many 
times been asked, will often be asked again : What 
would your national Church accomplish, supposing it 
came about, which the present conglomerate of sects 
cannot already do for us fairly well ? 

For an answer to this question we should look both 
abroad and at home. Briefly put, the answer is, that 
abroad we should be saved the spectacle of half a dozen 
competing divinity schools in Tokyo ; and that at home 
the maintenance of religion in our villages and towns 
would cease to be dependent on the uncertainties of 
" pink teas " and the doubtful aid of amateur theatri- 
cals. When dignity wholly disappears from the ad- 
ministration of religion, reverence presently takes wing. 
It is perfectly possible for worship to be dignified, even 
in dens and caves of the earth ; it is not possible for 
dignity to coexist with a scramble ; and who will deny 



46 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

that in small communities where every man and every 
dollar tells, the sectarian principle, from its very 
nature, necessarily entails a scramble. Moreover, 
the impression made upon the mind of the young 
by the spectacle of a splintered Christianity is the 
reverse of favorable. Accustomed to see law pre- 
senting itself in the courts with a united front, the 
young man learns to respect law. Were there as 
many competing temples of justice in an American 
city as there are rival temples of religion, the young 
man would be as quick to unlearn civic virtue as he is 
now disposed to throw up Christian faith. I shall 
never forget the impression made upon my mind in 
early life by my first sight of a Roman Catholic vil- 
lage with its great Church overtopping all roofs. 
Visible unity inspires respect, visible disintegration 
genders contempt. 

The Colonies would never have become The United 
States had the patriots of that day reasoned with 
respect to civil nationality after the fashion in which 
too many of us reason about ecclesiastical nationality. 
Most certainly, after having lumped together a republic 
in Massachusetts, a democracy in Rhode Island, a 
monarchy in New York, and an aristocracy in New 
Jersey, they would have declined to call the resulting 
amorphous mass a nation. The conveners of the Con- 
tinental Congress knew too much for that. You tell 
me that those men had physical force at their disposal 
and felt no scruple about using it. That is very true ; 
but it does not annul my contention that the unity 



PRACTICABILITY. 47 

which hopes to escape ridicule and to challenge 
respect must be an evident and palpable thing, not 
one that has to be continually explaining away ap- 
pearances that make it seem the very opposite of what 
it claims to be. A national Church would be, if 
nothing else, a great evidence of religion. 

The child who in a New England village of two 
hundred years ago saw, or in a South German village 
of to-day habitually sees, all the people passing on the 
Lord's Day through one porch into the Lord's House, 
grew up and grows up taking religion for granted. 
The American child of the present generation who 
sees his playmates, on six days of the week, go through 
the one school-house door, and on the one day of the 
week sees six differently labelled church doors crying 
out to the same boys and girls " Come in," inevitably 
conceives of religion as a matter in debate. " When 
I grow up," he says to himself, " I will find out what 
all this means. Somehow it looks as if our fathers 
and mothers did not feel about praying as they do 
about schooling." Yes, these things tell. Doubtless 
in the triumvirate of evil, the world and the flesh are 
the predominant partners as respects the number of 
souls enticed away from God ; but, in any fair reck- 
oning, the third member of the group, the devil of 
division, should have his due. 

Is it then my hope, you ask, that at some future 
census, say two hundred years from now (a short time 
in the life of the Christian Church), the great circle 
which will then probably be named North America 



48 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

may show the same unbroken disc of color that in the 
Census of 1890 distinguishes New Mexico ? I will 
not resent being shoved into this corner, but will boldly 
venture to answer, Yes, I do. For however strenu- 
ously I may disbelieve in the method by which eccle- 
siastical unity has been secured in New Mexico, I do 
not see how I can disparage the thing itself without 
by the same token censuring the Founder of the Church. 
New Mexico may be, and in my judgment is, most 
unfortunate in its type of Christianity, but in so far 
as it is at one with respect to what it has, New Mexico 
is to be congratulated. 

Consider the characteristics, the notes, of a possible 
national Church of the United States. Such a struc- 
ture would, first of all, possess as a matter of course, 
a basis of dogma. This foundation would be built, 
however, not of small bricks, but rather of huge, rough- 
hewn blocks of the sort that can be counted upon to 
stay put without cement ; solid masses of fact, that is 
to say, as distinguished from speculation ; basaltic 
rock which critics and controversialists might chip 
away at, as long as they pleased, without any very 
serious results. The primitive Creeds, the Apostles' 
and the Nicene, answer fairly well to this description. 
To be sure, they are deficient in u anthropology," but, 
on the other hand, it is to be remembered that they 
are running over with " Christ his lore." Not that 
I would speak disrespectfully of the great fabrics 
of theological thought which solitary thinkers like 
Aquinas and Calvin or grave assemblies of learned 



PRACTICABILITY. 49 

men have, in former or in recent times, framed and 
lifted. It is far easier to sneer at such architects than 
it is to rival their architecture. But the truth is, we 
need have no fear at all that the Church will ever 
lack for labored explanations of the full purport of 
the Christian revelation. That more treasures of 
knowledge are wrapped up, undiscovered, in the arti- 
cles of the Creed than have ever yet been dug out of 
them, is certain. To lay an interdict upon the search 
after this hidden wealth would be absurd ; but, for 
the very reason that this search is going on contin- 
ually and with success, a national Church is bound 
carefully to avoid confusing with the temporary " sys- 
tem " the everlasting Faith. The fact that our " little 
systems," as the late Laureate contemptuously called 
them, "have their day and cease to be," is no evi- 
dence that in their day, and before they ceased to 
be, they were not of considerable worth. The " sys- 
tems " of the alchemists were as much more elaborate 
than the systems of modern chemistry as the the- 
ology of Anselm is more intricate than the theology 
of Coleridge ; and yet it is doubtful whether without 
Paracelsus and Raymond Lully we should ever have 
had Faraday and Dumas. The really urgent question 
is, What is the special need of our day, this present, 
this modern day that we are living through? And 
to that inquiry the ancient Creeds make answer by 
simply holding up before our eyes the person Christ. 
So much for theology ; is it not enough ? 

And what of ethics ? Well, ethics is a form of 

4 



50 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

dogma, and would be sure to be recognized as such 
if men could only be persuaded to look deep enough. 
The words " Thou shalt not steal/' if we begin to 
philosophize about them, are found to appeal to faith 
quite as strongly as the words " God is One." The 
fact that the former saying is cast in the imperative 
mood and the latter in the indicative mood makes no 
difference ; it is in the believing mood that you and 
I receive them. Well, then, let us apply the same 
reasoning to ethics that we applied to dogma. A 
national Church must have an ethical Creed, not volu- 
minous, but clearly legible ; not necessarily a code, but 
most assuredly a standard. We need not postulate a 
national Church of teetotallers, for instance ; but we 
might as well have no Church at all as one that would 
admit the drunkard to its privileges. A national 
Church must not attempt to prove itself such by oblit- 
erating all the state-lines of morality. It must not, 
in a good-natured endeavor to be all things to all men, 
forget its obligation to be something to some men. 
There would have to be discipline, not minute, indeed, 
but real. It would mean a definite thing to be in full 
communion, and another definite thing not to be in 
full communion, with the Catholic Church. In a word, 
to change our figure of speech, as St. Paul when on 
this subject so easily does his, from stone and mortar 
to flesh and blood, we must remember that the mystical 
body of our Lord Jesus Christ, though mystical, is not 
invertebrate. So much for ethics. Is it not enough ? 
Well, and what of polity? First of all, let polity, 



PRACTICABILITY. 51 

whatever else it is, be frankly American. I say this 
in no Jingo spirit. I loathe and detest Jingoism in 
all its varieties. I know not which is worse, the native 
or the foreign brand ; I abhor them equally. But I 
am not ashamed of being an American. I should not 
be running on in this way about national Churches did 
I not believe in my heart that America, sect-ridden as 
it is thought to be, offers a better field for the upbuild- 
ing of a Church truly national than any other country 
the world over. Yes, I would see the Church Ameri- 
can in its length and breadth. Some people are so 
nervously afraid of bigness. " Don't let us allow the 
thing to get too large," they say, " lest we should be 
unable to manage it." Manage it ? And shall not 
God have care for his elect ? " Pray," said the Warden, 
or Elder (it does not matter which) of an old, ancestral 
parish somewhere on the North River, to the young 
minister who was about starting a mission Sunday- 
school, " Pray, don't introduce a novelty of this sort. 
What we 've always had up here, and what we want to 
continue to have, is a nice, snug little Zion of our own." 
It is this " snug little Zion " idea that has got to be 
torn up by the roots, if we are ever to know an Ameri- 
can Catholic Church. The English ivy is a beautiful 
plant, and nothing is one-half so becoming to church 
walls; but unfortunately the English ivy does not 
flourish in all climates, and to insist that it shall be 
" ivy or nothing " in a land where the woodbine and 
other fairly presentable vines are indigenous is a 
mistake. 



52 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

It was Mr. Ruskin who said that he would not visit 
America, because he could not imagine himself con- 
tent to live three months in a country where there 
were no castles. That was pardonable enough in Mr. 
Ruskin, but does his having said it lay any obligation 
on you and me to try to make good our country's 
deficiencies by reproducing on a small scale Stirling 
or Warwick ? No, you and I must take America as 
we find it ; comforting ourselves with the thought 
that Time, as a greater than Ruskin puts it, has a 
worthier task than merely 

" To make old bareness picturesque, 
And tuft with grass a feudal tower." 

Doubtless Americanism may be pushed too far. 
The demand for a distinctively American doctrine of 
Church unity is as fatuous as the demand for an 
American poetry and an American sculpture. Good 
poetry and good sculpture are what they are, quite 
independently of national lines. And so with Catho- 
licity ; the law of it is as fixed and definite as are the 
laws of light. It is only when we come to the appli- 
cation of the law that Americanism gets a standing 
in the court. So then, by all means, let Anglican 
influences and Anglican precedents be treated with 
all proper respect, it is but just and right that so it 
should be ; only let us waste no room-rent on the 
fools' paradise of those who fancy that American 
Christianity in its entirety can be Anglified. This 
people is not English, though we owe more to Eng- 



PRACTICABILITY. 53 

land than to all other countries put together; but 
this people is not English, it is a composite people, now 
in the course of being kneaded, as a woman kneads 
the materials of bread, into a homogeneous nationality. 
To assume that we are dealing with a pure English 
stock and to base our ecclesiastical polity upon that 
notion, is to invite collapse. The foundations of an 
enduring Catholicism lie deeper down. 

Even the Church of England is not national in the 
sense of comprising the great bulk of the people of 
England. It is justly called national, in that it was 
the core about which the nation, as a matter of his- 
torical fact, grew into being. It is national in that 
it is inwrought, as the late Lord Selborne 1 so con- 
clusively proved, not by the mere letter of a statute, 
but by a thousand unnoticed ties, into the constitution 
of the realm. But no one alleges that it has the sym- 
pathy or can command the allegiance of the nation 
as a whole. One may be an Englishman and a loyal 
Englishman without being an Anglican. Her Majesty 
herself, the Head of the Church, is a Presbyterian in 
Edinburgh. And if the American people is far from 
being English, still farther is the religious portion of 
the American people from being Anglican. We must 
remember this in all our reasonings about unity, or 
we shall go astray. 

But there is another feature of the Church of Eng- 
land that entitles her to be called national besides 

1 A Defence of the Church of England against Disestablishment, by 
Roundell, Earl of Selborne, pp. 28-31. 



54 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

the two which I just mentioned, and this other feature 
is one in which any Church that in any country as- 
pires to become national must resemble her. The 
Church of England is national, because she lays stress 
upon territory as such, and counts her children not 
per capita merely, but also in connection with the 
soil on which their homes are built. There is not a 
square league of England which is not within the 
borders of some one or another parish. This is the 
right principle. If the spiritual interests of a whole 
people are to be looked after systematically, if they 
are to be shepherded with thoroughness, there must 
be a recognition of metes and bounds. The names of 
St. Paul's Epistles are evidence that he looked at the 
matter in this light. He did not write out his theo- 
logical views essay-fashion; what he had to say he 
put into the form of a letter to the people living in a 
particular place with a recognized geographical posi- 
tion. The truth taught in the letter may have been 
one of universal interest; he may even have been 
setting forth, as in the case of the Colossians, a cos- 
mical theology as wide as the universe ; all the same, 
he addresses himself to " the saints and faithful breth- 
ren in Christ which are at Colosse," a town with town 
limits, a definite unit among the units which in their 
aggregate make up the Empire. 

I am assuming, of course, that the territory in 
question is both habitable and inhabited. Preten- 
tious paper-schemes which cover deserts and proclaim 
jurisdiction over wildernesses richly deserve the rid- 



PRACTICABILITY. 55 

icule they receive. But where a territory has a popu- 
lation, the Christian Church should aim at dealing 
with that population territorially, holding some person 
or persons answerable for the spiritual well-being of 
all souls within the boundary lines. This is the theory 
of the parish system, and it is a good theory. That 
it is nowhere carried out to perfection is no argument 
against it. Even the fishermen of the Gospel were 
under the necessity of mending their nets now and 
again. In a reticulation that covers a whole country, 
some meshes, here and there, are bound to get torn 
and to let through part of the catch. 

In this Republic, the obvious territorial units of 
structure are three in number, — the Union itself, the 
State, and the County. It is true that a certain por- 
tion of the national domain has not yet attained to 
what, in our political parlance, is known as " state- 
hood ; " and it is also true that in Louisiana the divi- 
sions elsewhere known as counties are called parishes. 
But these exceptions are not of a sort to encumber or 
embarrass the argument. That the Territories are 
destined, first or last, to be parcelled out into States, 
is generally acknowledged ; while, as for Louisiana, 
the fact of its having chosen to abide by the old 
nomenclature of its French period makes no real 
difference. 

Of these three units, the Republic, the State, and 
the County, the county is, historically speaking, by 
far the most ancient. In fact, with the exception of 
the city, there is perhaps no politico-geographical unit 



56 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

that can show an older lineage than the county. As 
its name indicates, the county originally made the 
jurisdiction of a comes, or count, so called because the 
" companion " in administration of the still higher offi- 
cial to whom the government of the province or pre- 
fecture as the case might be, had been intrusted. 
" With that tendency to division and subdivision," 
says a recent writer 1 on this subject, "which is the 
mark of thorough government, the provincial empire, 
at any rate in Western Europe, gradually assumed the 
shape of a mass of small districts, each administrated 
by its own comes" From continental Europe this 
county-system passed over into England, and from 
England was transmitted to America, where it has 
proved itself so well adapted to our civil needs as to 
have secured what is practically an universal accept- 
ance. It should be observed, in passing, that organi- 
zation by counties includes cities, inasmuch as every 
city is either by itself a county, or else is a constituent 
portion of some county. If, therefore, the Christian 
Church in this land is seeking for a self-consistent, 
easily understood territorial basis of organization, it 
cannot do better than accept for such a purpose the 
scheme which Americans in their political capacity 
have already fastened upon as the best ; namely, the 
Republic, the State, and the County. 

But what form shall the polity take on, supposing 
the territorial scheme to have been adopted ? Do not 
hastily charge me with Erastianism if I invite a return 

1 Mr. Edward Jeuks. 



PKACTICABILITY. 57 

to the Census as a means of finding light. Upon con- 
sulting such of the tables as bear upon this point we 
make the cheerful discovery that, as respects polity, 
there is among our Ten Tribes a far nearer approach 
to unanimity than one who had been contemplating 
exclusively their doctrinal divergences would have ex- 
pected to find. Ecclesiastical polity in this country, 
it appears, takes on one or other of three forms, ac- 
cording as it inclines to emphasize the principle of 
home-rule, the principle of counsel and advice, or 
the principle of a strong executive. 

With a view of getting out of the rut, I use these 
phrases to indicate, respectively, what are commonly 
known as Congregationalism, Presbyterianisni, and 
Episcopacy. We will waive, for the time being, 
all jure divino points, and look at the whole thing 
simply as a question of method. 

The Congregationalists believe with all their heart 
in a method which makes much of the local flock 
looked after by the local shepherd. This, they say, is 
the true unit, this group of souls, large enough fully 
to engage the energies of one pastor, and not too large 
to be gathered within four walls. They remind us 
that St. Paul speaks of being burdened with the care 
of all the " Churches," not of " all the Church," and 
they urge that when he does speak of " the Church " 
in the singular number, what he has in mind is the 
choir invisible of faithful souls rather than any hard- 
and-fast general society by which the whole earth is to 
be overspread. 



58 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

The Presbyterians are of opinion that this view of 
the matter is too loose. They deprecate the isolation 
of the single flock. They favor consultation among 
the shepherds, and more concert of action in the 
matter of tending and feeding the sheep ; for after all 
the flock is one ; — that various reading about " the 
fold " in St. John's tenth chapter does not really work 
any serious amendment of Christ's parable : the flock 
is one ; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. 

The Episcopalians urge, with a good deal of insis- 
tency, the value of headship in everything that has the 
character of an enterprise. Jesus Christ, they argue, 
has essayed the spiritual conquest of the world. The 
task which He has laid upon his followers is a militant 
task. He sanctioned leadership when He enrolled the 
Twelve and placed Himself at their head. He sanc- 
tioned it again, and for all time, when after his re- 
surrection He said of these same companions of his 
who had known his mind and become sharers of his 
purpose, u Go. Preach. Absolve. Baptize." That 
the Episcopalians would be found so arguing, their 
very name might have forewarned us. Episcopacy 
is nothing if not executive, a bishop meaningless 
save as a leader. 

If now we turn to the Census Tables with a view to 
finding how the religious mind of America stands 
affected towards these various principles of polity, we 
discover that of the twenty millions of communicants 
(I speak in round numbers) nearly six millions are for 
home-rule, something more than three millions for 



PRACTICABILITY. 59 

recognition of a Church universal administered by the 
conciliar method, and almost twelve millions for the 
leadership principle ; in other words, the friends of a 
polity of oversight outnumber all others by a clear 
majority of well-nigh three millions, — a striking fact, 
but one that is robbed of much of its apparent signifi- 
cance when we are told that under this head have 
been congregated three such dissonant and apparently 
irreconcilable elements as the Roman Catholics, the 
Methodists, and the Anglicans. 

In quoting these comparative statistics, I am as far 
as possible from wishing to suggest that the method 
of arriving at a conclusion in this ^matter is by count 
of heads or show of hands; God forbid. Rather 
my purpose is to argue that since each one of the three 
methods has so many adherents, the probability is 
that there must be much good in each ; and that better 
than the victory of any one would be the prevalence 
of some wise combination of them all. Why need it 
be thought a thing impossible that in the course of 
the next century this should be brought to pass ? 

Imagine a county Church. The centre of adminis- 
tration is the county-town. Here dwells the chief 
pastor of the Christians of the county. His position, 
although one of dignity, is not one of splendor. His 
duties are far more urgent than his honors are con- 
spicuous. He is simply the master-missionary of the 
region, which, although large enough to keep him busy, 
is not so large as to make the personal care of souls 
impossible. 



60 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

From time to time, at stated intervals, there gather 
about this leader his counsellors, clerical and lay. 
He and they consult together for the good of religion 
in the county, talk over the spiritual needs of the 
various towns and villages, plan anew the ever-shift- 
ing campaign, and make provision for the sinews of 
war. It is not necessary to suppose that all the nom- 
inal Christians in the County have given in their ad- 
hesion to this arrangement ; for the purposes of our 
" iridescent dream " it will suffice if the great bulk of 
them have done so. 

Well, then, have we not here a microcosm of the 
United Church ? What is lacking ? Anything ? The 
home-rule principle has justice done to it ; for the lo- 
cal Church of each town, each village, is, as respects 
the management of its affairs, the choice of its pastor, 
the handling of its revenues, autonomous. The syno- 
dal and conciliar principle has justice done to it ; for, 
instead of each little group of disciples living by itself 
and for itself, as if no other group existed, we see the 
representatives of the groups coming together once a 
year, or as much oftener as may be found desirable, 
to exchange ideas, and incite one another to better 
things. The principle of leadership has justice done 
to it ; for, convinced that what is everybody's business 
is nobody's business, the Christian people of the 
County have seated at the heart of things one whom 
they hold in a special sense responsible for the effi- 
cient conduct of their affairs. What is there inhe- 
rently absurd or chimerical in such a picture as this ? 



PRACTICABILITY. 61 

The very same three principles work together happily 
enough in civil polity ; what is to prevent their doing 
so in ecclesiastical polity ? 

Take a step further. Imagine the overseers of the 
various counties, together with representative pastors 
and representative laymen from each county, meeting 
together once in three years, or oftener if necessary, 
in the capital city of the State. There are religious 
interests that people have in common as citizens of 
the same State other and larger than those which 
they share as dwellers in the same county ; such in- 
terests, for example, as those that pertain to marriage 
and divorce, the education of the young, and the ten- 
ure of Church property. The presidency of this larger 
Council would naturally fall to one of the county over* 
seers, either because of his seniority in office, or be- 
cause of the relative importance of the town or city 
which might happen to be the centre of his activities. 
Again, what is there intrinsically absurd or chimerical 
in this picture of a council representative of the reli- 
gion of a whole State ? Is any violence done to the 
principle of home-rule ? Are not the value of con- 
ference and the importance of headship as fully recog- 
nized in this instance as in the other ? 

Take one more step. Imagine a bi-cameral assem- 
bly convened, we will say, once in nine or ten years, 
and representative of all the States of the Union, the 
smaller of the two Houses made up of representative 
chief pastors, one, or at most two, for each State ; 
and the larger composed of pastors and laymen in 



62 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

numbers proportionate to the populations of the States 
from which they come. 

As in the case of the State Council, the presidency 
of this national body might be determined either by 
seniority or by such other consideration as experience 
should show to be the most urgent. Neither of the 
two Houses composing the National Council would be 
so large as to be cumbersome, for the number of our 
States is not likely ever to exceed one hundred ; and 
with the two branches of a bi-cameral legislature 
standing to each other in the ratio of one hundred to 
three hundred, no serious difficulties of procedure 
would emerge. 

There remains to be considered the question of 
worship. As there are three leading types of polity, 
so are there three marked varieties of divine ser- 
vice ; to wit, the unliturgical, the elaborately liturgical, 
and what may be called the intermediate variety. 
What are we to do with these in the interest of Amer- 
ican Catholicity ? Abolish two out of the three ? 
That would be rather an arduous undertaking. Jum- 
ble all three of them together, making a quartum 
quid, the like of which never was seen before ? That 
would seem to be an endeavor less promising still. 
But what is there foolish in the suggestion that a 
single building, by the simple device of a greater fre- 
quency in the hours of service than is common among 
Protestants, might be made to meet the devotional 
needs alike of those who love a formal and of those 
who prefer, I will not say an informal, but a less 



PRACTICABILITY. 63 

formal method of publicly worshipping Almighty 
God ? The Roman Church recognizes and acts upon 
a similar principle in its classification of Masses into 
Low Masses and High Masses. It is incumbent upon 
every good Romanist that he go to Mass, and he neg- 
lects the duty at the peril of his soul ; but it is not 
exacted of him that he attend High Mass if he prefers 
Low. The English Church scores a good point against 
the Roman by insisting, as it does, upon having the 
public services rendered in " a tongue understanded 
of the people ; " but the Roman Church scores a good 
point against the English in providing that within 
the walls of one and the same consecrated building 
widely different types of service shall at different 
hours find recognition. 

It is true that I am pleading for a larger applica- 
tion of this principle than the Roman Church allows, 
since there is undoubtedly a wider gulf between the 
non-liturgical and the liturgical celebration of the 
divine mysteries than between High Mass and Low 
Mass ; but even if the people of an American town 
felt that they must needs " build three tabernacles," 
so that each type of worship might have its own sep- 
arate and distinctive home, there would still be fewer 
competing altars in that town by some six or seven 
than there are to-day. There may be, there probably 
are, Anglicans and Roman Catholics among us san- 
guine enough to suppose that the rising tide of litur- 
gical interest, so noticeable in the religious life of 
America just now, is destined to continue rising until 



64 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

it shall have swept everything before it. "Be pa- 
tient/' they say. " Much has been accomplished ; 
more is coming. Wait a little, and presently you 
shall hear all American Christians singing their 
prayers on one note." I doubt it. We Americans 
are not all of us musical, and the unmusical ones are 
likely, in "this free country," to go on saying, in- 
stead of singing, their prayers to the end of the chap- 
ter. At the epoch of the Reformation, worship had 
become a fine art. Let it be practised as a fine art 
still for the benefit of those who are edified thereby ; 
but let us bear in mind the fact that there are artisans 
in the world as well as artists, and not stupidly attempt 
to force a high aesthetic standard upon souls not yet 
cultivated to the point of being able to apprehend it. 
The impact of Protestant thought upon the institute 
of worship may not, it is true, have produced all the 
effect that was anticipated ; but it is unlikely that 
it will prove to have been wholly resultless. Some 
things have been learned that will not be unlearned, 
some franchises secured that will not be relinquished. 

If liturgical worship really does possess that su- 
preme excellence which many of us associate with 
it, we may safely trust to the "workings of the law of 
natural selection to bring things out right in the end. 

It may be objected to what I have been recom- 
mending, that to carry it out would complicate mat- 
ters, and rob us of that simplicity which is one of 
religion's chiefest charms. But let us not suffer our- 
selves to be beguiled by words. Doubtless simplicity 



PRACTICABILITY. 65 

is of the very highest value, where it may be had. 
We marvel at, and are often disposed to covet, the 
simplicity of apostolic days. The Lady Ecclesia of 
that era made out to live and thrive, yes, and show a 
very fair and comely countenance, amid surroundings 
of a most unelaborate sort. Just as the queen, born 
a peasant girl, whom some King Cophetua had loved 
and wedded, might look back half sorrowfully from 
her throne-room in the palace with its weight of em- 
broidered hangings, its wealth of gems and gold, to 
the old days when she walked barefoot, pitcher in 
hand, along the grassy path that led from the cottage 
to the spring, so it is not unnatural for the modern 
Church, with all its inherited treasures, its great bur- 
den of memories, traditions, usages, its councils and 
canons, its ecclesiastical jurisprudence and ecclesio- 
logical wealth, to look back, now and then, with some- 
thing like regret to those crisp morning hours when 
it was enough that there should be an upper room to 
meet in, a little bread and wine, a " hymn to Christ 
as God," and a few prayers. But to a great extent 
we must, in matters where evolution has had play, 
take things as we find them. Growths that have 
come to maturity cannot be spirited out of existence 
at a word. It is folly to suppose that the so-called 
simplicity of the seeding-time, a simplicity even at 
that stage of affairs more apparent than real, can 
be reinstated at will, or be depended upon to repro- 
duce itself if only we can muster courage enough to 

cut down the existing tree. The cloud-giant of the 

5 



66 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

Arabian tale was with difficulty coaxed back into his 
casket ; vastly more formidable would be the task of 
compelling an oak to retire into an acorn. In a so- 
ciety which undertakes to embrace within its limits 
all sorts and conditions of men, and to meet the 
spiritual needs of every one of them, we must expect 
the administration of worship to prove itself a some- 
what complex undertaking, and must not be dis- 
couraged at finding it necessary to tolerate, within 
the same ecclesiastical bounds, rites and usages strik- 
ingly diverse. Why should it be for me any greater 
hardship to dwell in the same Church with a man who 
dotes upon candles and incense, than to dwell in the 
same town with him ? It is I who have to be " toler- 
ated " as well as he. 

We have now come into possession of three watch- 
words of unity. In the field of Dogma, theological 
and ethical, the watchword is Condensation ; in the 
field of Polity, the watchword is Co-ordination ; in the 
field of Worship, the watchword is Classification. 

It will be said, and with much show of reason, that 
I have managed to get over the ground by jumping 
the pitfalls. But really it has been no part of my 
purpose to dodge the difficulties of the subject. I own 
to having made as sanguine a showing as I could ; but 
that has been because I believe in the practice of hope, 
as a Christian virtue, and because I refuse to believe 
that the clearly defined purpose of Jesus Christ is des- 
tined to suffer defeat. 

That in each one of the three fields we have been 



PRACTICABILITY. 67 

traversing there stands a crux, I have no desire to 
deny. 

In the region of dogma, the crux is the sacramental 
theology. 1 Unless the philosophy of grace can be 
declared neutral ground, and honestly dealt with as 
such, there is no hope for Christian unity, either in 
the near future or in the far. 

In the region of polity, the crux is the value of 
historicity in connection with Holy Orders. Unless 
those who care nothing for the continuity of the 
sacred ministry can persuade themselves that it is 
worth while to conserve that continuity for the sake 
of those who do care very much about it, there is no 
hope for Christian unity either in the near future or 
in the far. 

In the region of worship, the crux is again the sacra- 
mental element. Unless those who believe and those 
who do not believe in such a mystical presence of 
Christ in the Holy Eucharist as differences that ser- 
vice intrinsically from all other exercises of worship, 
can be persuaded to bear with each other's ways in 
practice, there is no hope for Christian unity either 
in the near future or in the far, and our vision of a 
national Church is but a will-o-the-wisp. 

It all turns upon whether the Tory, mystical, ro- 
manticist disposition which loves to take its light 
through stained glass, and the Whig, non-mystical, 
common-sense disposition which thinks to save the 
world by founding Useful Knowledge Societies can 

1 See Appendix A. 



68 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

live together peaceably in the same house. The thing 
would seem to be impossible ; — and yet the Book of 
Proverbs and the Book of Psalms rub shoulders in 
the one Bible ; and the Christ of the Synoptists and 
the Christ of the Fourth Gospel are one Christ. 

At any rate, I beseech you to acquit me of the 
slightest desire to minimize these difficulties. They 
are not to be disposed of by an airy wave of the hand, 
or conjured away by the magic of a few glib sen- 
tences. They lie deep ; they are triple-walled ; they 
frown. If I have shunned discussing them in detail, 
it has not been from any lack of appreciation of their 
magnitude, but simply because of a conviction that 
my time might be better bestowed upon obstacles 
which could be shown to be removable. In the 
enchanted forest that surrounds the palace where 
the sleeping princess lies, there is much wood-cut- 
ting of a manageable sort to be done before we 
reach the densest thicket of all. For the present, 
those students of the subject do most to help for- 
ward national churchmanship who concentrate their 
strength on the task of finding where the line runs 
between the difficulties which are imaginary and the 
difficulties which are real. In the minds of most 
persons the two sorts of barriers loom equally large. 
To teach men to discriminate is to help them on 
their way. Stuffed lions and live lions at a little 
distance look alike, but they are not equally to be 
feared. 

I have spoken throughout from the view-point of a 



PRACTICABILITY. 69 

member of the Episcopal Church. There are hope- 
ful signs, not a few, that that body is beginning to 
discern the pettiness of its old denominationalism, 
and is awaking to a sense of what true catholicity 
demands. It is no longer seriously contended that 
the momentous issues of national churchmanship 
are to be settled by ascertaining which discoverer 
first sighted land on what is now the territory of 
the United States, or by proving that the first baby 
christened within the colonies was baptized into this 
faith or that. It has come to be discerned that the 
roots of the question strike much deeper and spread 
much further. 

Moreover, what is better still, kindliness and sym- 
pathy are coming to the fore in unexampled pleni- 
tude. We are discovering how many of our old 
alienations were founded upon strifes of words rather 
than on strifes of fact. A little of the oil of glad- 
ness goes a long way as a lubricant. What we need 
now is to get near each other. When the picket- 
guards of bivouacking armies find themselves within 
speaking distance, they are very apt to acknowledge 
one another not such bad fellows after all. 

Then, again, there is that advice of St. Paul's about 
looking, not every man on his own things, but every 
man also on the things of others. Slowly we are 
learning to grow mutually appreciative. Even in 
the case of that widest, deepest, and apparently most 
hopeless of all the gulfs that yawn across Christen- 
dom, I mean that which sunders Roman Catholics 



70 A NATIONAL CHUKCH. 

from Protestants, when we consider that northern 
Europe is almost wholly of the one complexion and 
southern Europe almost wholly of the other, there 
is much to be said in favor of a partition of awards. 
It does seem absurd, upon the face of it, does it not? 
to suppose that all the goodness and all the truth are 
with the northern nations, and all the badness and 
all the error with the southern ones. 1 

Moreover, it behooves all of us to be modest. The 
more confident a man is of the soundness of his posi- 
tion, the less need has he to bluster about it. The 
Hebrew people in the times before Christ had the 
strongest possible grounds for ecclesiastical self- 
confidence. They knew themselves to be in a true 
and a deep sense the people of God ; theirs were the 
promises, theirs the tables of the Law, theirs the 
Scriptures of truth. All the same, when some of 
them took to boasting rather noisily about it, and ex- 
claimed with vexatious iteration, as if once were not 
enough, " The temple of the Lord, the temple of the 
Lord, the temple of the Lord are we," God sent his 
prophet to give them fair warning that if they went on 
talking in that supercilious way He would quickly put 
them on a level, in the matter of privilege, with the 
" out-landers " whom they despised. The true policy 
for every denomination that is among us is to begin 
at the other end, and, frankly recognizing as bona 
fide members of Christ's Holy Church Universal all 
who have been baptized with water into the name of 

1 See Appendix B. 



PRACTICABILITY. 71 

the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, to 
see whether it cannot modestly contribute something 
that shall help this sacramental host to realize in 
outward form and shape its already latent oneness. 

The Episcopal Church in this new world stands, 
at the present moment, at the parting of the ways. 
After a century of infancy, a century of childhood, 
and a century of adolescence, she has come at last 
to her majority, and reports for duty. "For duty," 
and towards whom ? Towards all, no doubt, whom 
her voice can reach or her hand help, but in a special 
sense towards those twenty millions of believers who 
among our sixty or seventy millions of population 
have with their own mouth and consent openly ac- 
knowledged Christ. Her errand to these is the 
errand of the reconciler and the peacemaker. 

Leadership is what is wanted. The land cries out 
for it, — wise, sympathetic, modest, clear-eyed, fear- 
less leadership. Gladly, in the present temper of 
our American Christendom, gladly would this leader- 
ship be conceded to the historic Church of the 
English-speaking peoples, were she only to show a 
willingness to meet half-way with friendly conces- 
sions and just acknowledgments that could in no 
wise harm her claims, those who read the same 
Bible, honor the same Sacraments, and love the 
same Lord Jesus Christ. 

Surely an American Catholic Church worthy of the 
name ought to have some goodlier words for those 
whom it is her duty to gather and include, than the 



72 A NATIONAL CHURCH. 

cold, hard, stolid Non possumus of absolutism, or 
the sharp apothegm, This people which knoweth not 
the rubrics is accursed. 

If we would enlist the strong minds, the warm 
hearts, the strenuous souls of our day in the service 
of the Church of Christ, the Church of Christ must 
be attractively presented. Her grandeur must be 
appreciated, the wide reach of her comprehensive- 
ness displayed. The trouble is that we too often 
identify the Church of God with all manner of trifling 
details that are no part of its essence, and then lift 
up hands of holy horror if one whom we are trying 
to win retorts contemptuously, " Is that the society, 
that the spiritual commonwealth, that the fellowship 
of souls, in behalf of which you would have me work 
myself up into a fine enthusiasm? No, I have better 
things to do; loftier aims absorb me, and larger 
hopes. Build your little city. I go my way." 

But would you turn this haughty critic's slur into 
a humble prayer for guidance? Show him the true 
picture of the Church of God. Let him see the length 
and breadth and height and depth of it. Open his 
eyes to behold that innumerable company of faithful 
men who even now, to-day, in all climates, under 
all skies, are making the imitation of Christ their 
persistent aim. When the Kingdom is thus con- 
ceived of, when it is recognized as gathering up into 
itself all that has been most precious in the past, 
and all that makes for greater spiritual achievement 
in days to come, we cease to wonder at a saying 



PRACTICABILITY. 73 

attributed to one of the worthies of the primitive 
days, "He that hath God for his Father hath the 
Church for his Mother;" for this ministration to 
the ideal side of our nature, of which I have been 
speaking, is the very sort of mothering we want. 
We are tempted to grow hard, we are tempted to 
grow bitter, we are tempted to grow cynical; for 
human life, as we see it, has much that is repellent 
to show, much that is despicable, much that is sordid. 
Is there, we ask, can there be any hope for such a 
world as this? The vision of the city that is at 
unity with itself is God's reply. For that it is 
worth one's while to live. For that some, perad- 
venture, might even dare to die. 



APPENDIX. 



" Now I take my farewell of my most deare brethren of the 
forrain Churches with the exhortation of most holy Augustine, 
If you will live of the Holy Spirit, hold Charity, love Verity, desire 
Unity, that you may come to Eternity. To the God of heaven 
who is the God of Peace ; to Jesus Christ our Lord who is 
the Prince of Peace ; to the Holy Spirit, who is the Bond of 
Peace, be Glory, Honor, and Thanksgiving for ever and 
ever. Amen." 

Closing Sentences of Bishop Davenanfs 
Exhortation to Brotherly Communion, 16 £1. 



APPENDIX. 

A. 

CONCERNING NEUTRALIZATION OF TERRI- 
TORY IN THE REGION OP SACRAMENTAL 
THEOLOGY. 1 

It is written of the Lord Jesus Christ that, as the 
end drew near, He gathered his disciples about 
Him in an upper room, and having broken bread 
with the words "This is my body," and having 
blessed wine with the words " This is my blood of 
the new covenant, " He gave them to eat and to drink, 
adding the injunction, "This do in remembrance of 
Me." It is further recorded that after the resurrec- 
tion, on a mountain in Galilee, at a meeting specially 
appointed, and so given an emphasized sanctity and 
significance, He said to the Eleven, " Go ye there- 
fore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptiz- 
ing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost." From the Book of Acts, 
our first chapter of Church History, we learn that the 

1 Extract from a Reiuecke Lecture read before the Faculty and 
Students of the Theological Seminary at Alexandria, Va. 



78 APPENDIX. 

disciples understood this commandment to involve 
the use of the element of water. 

It thus appears that to his Gospel, which might 
otherwise have been understood to be a simple 
announcement of abstract truth with respect to " the 
idea of God " and "the destiny of man," Jesus Christ 
indissolubly linked two outward observances, each 
of which necessitated a use of what physicists 
and chemists know as matter. A spiritualist, as 
Lucretius would have judged Him, a materialist, as 
Plato would have declared Him, the Son of Man 
stood up in full face of both philosophies, and said, 
" I pronounce you wedded. Those whom God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder." 

The opening words of the General Confession in 
the Communion Office of the Book of Common 
Prayer, wherein we address the Almighty as the 
"Maker of all things" and the "Judge of all men," 
suggest that God sustains a close and real relation 
to two worlds, — a world material and a world 
spiritual, — and that in a deep sense (though not in 
Spinoza's sense) both of these worlds are one in 
Him. It is true that in the order of the phrases a 
distinction of rank is recognized. We are not en- 
couraged to infer that the two worlds are of equal 
value or of equal dignity. It is by an ascending 
climax that we pass from the Maker of " things " to 
the Father and the Judge of " men. " But what is 
distinctly asserted with respect to both body and 
spirit, things and men, is this, — that between them 



APPENDIX. 79 

there lies no such difference as necessarily involves 
contrariety or schism ; they admit of harmonizing if 
only one can get at the true formula of their har- 
mony ; they are not really enemies, they are friends. 
Alone among theists, the Christian has the courage 
cordially to welcome this belief. Partly because 
Nature has always been the stronghold of idolatry, 
and partly because so much of what goes on in Nature 
appears to militate against our conceptions of the 
holiness and the loving kindness of God, theists, as 
such, find themselves strongly tempted to mark a 
great gulf between the two realms, the spiritual and 
the material, and to plant danger signals on the 
hither side. 

" Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams ? " 

asks the doubting heart in In Mernoriam, evidently 
disposed to think that so it must be ; and even such 
a clear-headed Christian thinker as Coleridge is said 
to have defined Nature as "the devil in a strait- 
jacket. " But in its censure of the Manichaean heresy, 
the Church early set the stamp of its disapproval 
upon sentiments of this sort, and reaffirmed, in the 
face of objections that must have seemed even more 
formidable to the mind of those days than they seem 
to the mind of these, St. Paul's dicta that "the 
earth is the Lord's," and that "every creature of 
God is good." 

These thoughts lead up to the following ques- 
tions : — 



80 APPENDIX. 

(a) How, as a matter of fact, has the mind of 
Christendom stood affected towards the sacramental 
element in the religion of the New Testament during 
the centuries that have elapsed since the mandates 
" Do this " and " Go, baptize " were issued ? 

(b) How stand the two Sacraments of the Gospel 
related to the general question of the unity of the 
Church ? 

(c) Is there anything about the third article of 
the Lambeth Declaration 1 that conspicuously differ- 
entiates it from other formal utterances upon the 
same subject with which it is natural for us to 
compare it? 

First, then, how has it fared with the institutes 
themselves ? How have men thought and felt and 
spoken and written about sacraments during the sixty 
generations, more or less, covered by Church history ? 

"Very variously," is the only answer possible. 

As was just intimated, the attitude of the indi- 
vidual Christian towards the sacramental element 
will, in every case, be largely determined by his 
native cast of mind. If he be one who naturally 
inclines to take things in the concrete, and who 
abhors abstractions, esteeming them to be mere 
unsubstantial nothings, he will incline to magnify 
the sacraments, and to wonder why there should be 
so few of them. If, on the other hand, his personal 

1 " The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself, Baptism and the 
Supper of the Lord, ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of 
institution and of the elements ordained by Him." 



APPENDIX. 81 

bias is distinctly towards idealism, disposing him to 
brand as unspiritual and earthy whatsoever religious 
product refuses to let itself be completely volatilized 
in the alembic of criticism, he will almost inevitably 
take the minimizing line, and instead of wondering 
why Christ should have ordained no more than two 
sacraments, as generically necessary to salvation, 
will rather marvel that He should have ordained any 
at all. For to a completely subjective system of 
theology, a sacrament is ex vi termini an excrescence. 

As with individuals, so with their f ollowings ; for, 
after all, a "school of thought," so called, is but 
the aura that exhales from and orbs itself about 
a strong personality : sects, parties, denominations, 
are observed to be sacramental or non-sacramental 
in their general tone, according to the character of 
the invitation given out by the founder when the 
sect, party, or denomination took its rise. 

Moreover, it is inevitable that in this matter the 
law of reaction should, from time to time, make 
itself felt; religion of the ultra-sacramental type 
becoming so plainly and hopelessly materialistic and 
mechanical that earnest men are impelled, out of 
very loyalty to Him who is a Spirit, to break with 
it altogether. 

The Protestant Reformation, on its theological as 
distinguished from its political side, was a gigantic 
movement of this sort. A complicated sacramental 
system, hammered out on the anvils of the school- 
men, had been fastened as by bolts and rivets about 

6 



82 APPENDIX. 

the body of Christ, until the Church had found itself 
actually imprisoned in its own armor. What won- 
der if, in the violence of the escape from this man- 
made coat of mail, the inner and more delicate fabric 
of the true sacramental vesture which Christ, out of 
pity for man's nakedness, had woven with his own 
hands should have suffered hurt? It could not be 
otherwise. A live Christianity protests against a 
materialized religion as instinctively as the eye 
protests against the cinder that has found its way 
beneath the lid ; and when men have had dinned into 
them for centuries the doctrine that only by sacer- 
dotal manipulation can they be saved, it only needs 
the translation of the New Testament into the vulgar 
tongue and a consequent acquaintance with what 
that document has to say about mint, anise, and cum- 
min and the baptism of pots and pans, to precipitate 
a revolution. 

Thus swings the pendulum, thus ebbs and flows 
the tide: first the image-maker; then the image- 
breaker ; then, chisel in hand, the restorer of damaged 
carvings, saying cheerily, "After all, the image was 
not so bad; let us supply the lost features, change 
the expression a bit, and put it back in the old 
niche." Eighteenth-century Boston turned the Gos- 
pel of Christ into a metaphysic, but kept on observing 
the " ordinances " by force of habit, all unconscious, 
as it would seem, that Puritan premises necessitated 
Quaker conclusions. By and by came Emerson, true 
child of idealizing forbears, saying to his startled 



APPENDIX. 83 

communicants, What have these material emblems 
to do with a spiritual religion ? How long halt ye 
between two opinions ? If the Pope be right, follow 
him; but if George Pox, follow him. Either take 
these things hence or dismiss me from my charge. 

This sounded logical as well as ethical, and many 
of New England's best flocked to the transcendental 
standard. But after one generation of these keen- 
witted folk had made trial of a Christianity stripped 
of its raiment and left bare, devout hearts not a few 
woke up to perceive and to confess that the outward 
side of religion had its value also; the voice of 
Oxford, nay, of Rome, was heard in the gates, and 
it began to be whispered of Bostonians, Lo, they 
attend Mass. 

(h) What is the bearing of the sacramental ele- 
ment in religion upon the general question of the 
unity of the Church ? 

All societies are committed by the very nature of 
their being to some measure of symbolism. Men 
who find themselves, by the condition of their birth 
or by a definite voluntary act of their own, knit 
together, insist that by some outward action or 
object this oneness shall be made apparent. The 
essential fact itself is indeed invisible, but who is 
to be the wiser for the fact, unless at some point in 
the circuit the viewless unifying force flashes into 
light ? Scores of familiar phrases testify to this 
truth; "a family crest," "the regimental colors," 
"a civic seal," — these are witnesses, respectively, 



84 APPENDIX. 

to tribal, military, and municipal unity. People 
seldom, if ever, dispute about these emblems, and 
for the simple reason that they are understood to 
stand for facts with respect to which there is no 
difference of opinion. The data of a man's origin 
and kinship are settled and fixed ; how, then, should 
he dispute over the heraldic token of that which he 
cannot change if he would ? Manifestly, his true 
wisdom is to make the best and the most of what is 
unalterable. Hence, as a rule, men take both pride 
and satisfaction in any symbolism that reminds them 
of a unity to which they stand, so to say, inevitably 
committed. Only " the man without a country " 
would dream of going in search of the most beauti- 
ful of all flags in order that under it he might live. 
He instinctively cheers the flag under which he was 
born, because, having been born under it, he has 
always thought of it as his own flag. It indicated na- 
tional decadence and disunion that the Psalmist 
should have felt moved to complain, " We see not our 
tokens. " Rob the Church of her sacramental guar- 
antees of unity, break down with axes and hammers 
her font and altar, and you provoke the same cry. 
How can we know that we are one if we see not the 
tokens; and, contrariwise, if we see the tokens, are 
we not reminded by the very sight that, however we 
may differ on a thousand points, we still, in the 
very truest and deepest sense of all, are one body in 
Christ ? Sacraments, in a word, are sacraments of 
pre-existent fact. 



APPENDIX. 85 

But there is more to be said for the unifying power 
of sacraments even than this. It is not enough to 
show the emblematic value of Baptism and the Lord's 
Supper. These forms of action are, indeed, wit- 
nesses to the oneness of those who join in solemniz- 
ing them, but how stand they connected with that 
Spirit of life without whose energizing and vivify- 
ing presence unity is, and must continue, a barren 
name ? 

The masters in Sociology tell us that the two prime 
factors in the evolution of the human race are the 
instinct of reproduction and the struggle for food. 
Children perpetually coming to the birth, men for- 
ever toiling and moiling that they may find bread for 
themselves and for those whom they have begotten, — ■ 
this, even this, after history has mouthed its finest 
phrases, and art spread its brightest colors, and 
poetry sung its softest notes, — this, even this, is what 
it all comes to, so far as the earthly side of things is 
concerned, that we should be born, and having been 
born should strive for the means of keeping alive. 
Surely to Sociology we may say, if this be indeed 
her last word to us, " Thank you for nothing. " 

But what a different aspect the whole thing takes 
on when looked at from the heavenly places ! Christ 
comes into the world, not only that He may live the 
life of man, but that He may, in the fine phrase of the 
Te Deum, " lift us up for ever," so carrying the very 
manhood itself into God. His mission is not merely 
to prepare people to die, — what a melancholy blunder 



86 APPENDIX. 

it was, ever to have put such an interpretation upon 
his errand ! — not merely to prepare people to die, but 
to prepare " a people " to live. He appears upon the 
planet's surface that He may become the re-organizer 
of the human race. " Make ready for the Kingdom," 
is the cry of his announcer. " Make ready for the 
Kingdom," is his own cry when He is come. 

But the new Society, the coming Kingdom, is not 
to be wholly different from the old. It is to be the 
old glorified and ennobled. Whatever, therefore, is 
most central to the sociology of human life as it is 
will be likely to discover its counterpart and analogue 
in the Sociology of the Kingdom. Even so we find it. 
His Church is given by Christ two sacraments, and 
only two ; because these are adequate to meet the two 
great demands of society as such — namely, the need 
that members shall be born into it, and the need that 
for the children thus begotten and brought forth there 
shall be food ; otherwise the grand enterprise of mak- 
ing a people must fail. The sacrament of Baptism is 
the sacrament of birth. The subject of it is regenerate 
or born anew into the family of God. The sacrament 
of Holy Communion is the sacrament of nourishment. 
" As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the 
Father ; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by 
me." Certainly it ought to startle those who are to- 
day belittling the claims of Jesus Christ upon the 
gratitude of mankind, to note how marvellously his 
sacramental mandates have anticipated the ripest 
modern thought. It would appear that it is Science 



APPENDIX. 87 

that is catching up with Christ, rather than Christ 
who is lagging behind Science. 

This is one interpretation of the significance of the 
sacraments ; others are possible and valuable, for it is 
the glory of visible symbolism that it combines under 
a single outward form more shades and phases of 
truth than can possibly be put into any single verbal 
proposition. This particular rationale of the matter 
seems to be the one that underlies the sacramental 
offices of the Book of Common Prayer. It may be 
considered as a Greek in contrast with a Latin way 
of looking at the thing. 

(c) But what of the attitude taken up by the Bishops 
at Lambeth with reference to this whole subject ? 
The third of the four articles that compose the Decla- 
ration reads as follows : " The two Sacraments or- 
dained by Christ Himself, Baptism and the Supper of 
the Lord, ministered with unfailing use of Christ's 
words of institution and of the elements ordained by 
Him." 

This language would seem to admit of only one 
construction, and that a very generous one. As 
against those who hold that no sacraments are essen- 
tial to the unity of the Church, it is indeed exclusive ; 
as against those who hold that sacraments other than 
those ordained by Christ Himself are essential to the 
unity of the Church, it is also exclusive ; but it is 
hospitable to all who, having accepted the Scriptures 
and assented to the primitive Creeds, are content to 
receive and to observe Baptism and the Lord's Supper 



88 APPENDIX 

under the form prescribed in the New Testament. 
The large catholicity of this way of putting the thing 
has scarcely had justice done it thus far in the discus- 
sion. Neither in England nor in America does there 
seem to have been any adequate appreciation of what 
it meant for Anglican theologians to concede so much 
as is here conceded. That this article should have 
been allowed to pass, as it has passed, almost without 
challenge and as if it were the merest commonplace, is, 
of all the surprises of which this long debate has been 
prolific, the most surprising. When we consider how 
the whole Anglican Communion has been, for three 
hundred years, racked and torn by disputes as to the 
true philosophy of the sacraments ; when we recall 
the scores, yes, the hundreds of volumes that have been 
written during the last half-century, to go no further 
back, for the purpose of unfolding and establishing 
the true theory of baptismal regeneration and eucha- 
ristic grace, — how astonishing it is that a proposition 
to throw theories to the wind and to rest content with 
simply observing the mandates, leaving the blessing to 
come in such fashion as it shall please God to send it, 
— how amazing that, with all the facts of the past in 
full view, such a proposition as this should have pro- 
voked no ripple of dissent, stirred no syllable of protest! 
One might suppose that the Church of England and its 
sister Church in this country would have been up in 
arms. And yet well-intentioned people by the thou- 
sand, who do not mean to misrepresent any person or 
any thing, go on saying that the Lambeth Declaration 



APPENDIX. 89 

exhibits no real concession on the part of those who 
framed it, and that it is nothing in the world but a 
plausible device for persuading non-Episcopal Chris- 
tians to become Episcopalians in ignorance of what 
they are about. No concession on the part of An- 
glicans in declaring that henceforth there shall be 
on their part no insistence upon any theory of the 
sacraments provided the sacraments themselves are 
honored and their use maintained ? No concession ? 
Why, the history of English religion, since Elizabeth's 
reign, shows nothing to compare with it. Think of 
the long succession of wrangles over this subject, be- 
ginning from the day when men were burned to death 
for having erroneously conceived the doctrine of the 
real presence, and coming down to the latest instance 
of imprisonment for ritual malpractice ; recall the 
Gorham controversy, the Hampden controversy ; re- 
member the silencing of Pusey, the hegira of Newman; 
refresh your recollection of the Tractarian literature ; 
read again the Apologia and the Eirenicon; look back 
at the genesis of the Eeformed Episcopal Church, and 
then declare, is it nothing that the leaders of the Com- 
munion which has witnessed all this fratricidal strife 
should come forward — voluntarilv come forward — 
and declare that a man's philosophy of the sacraments 
shall no longer be made the test of his fitness to receive 
the sacraments ? 

And yet we are continually hearing it said, on this 
side and that, as the discussion proceeds, " Oh, as to 
the first three articles of the Declaration, we need not 



90 APPENDIX. 

waste time over them, — about them we are practically 
agreed already ; the only point worth arguing is ' the 
historic Episcopate.' " 

Now, while it is true that the question of the 
historic Episcopate, for the reason that it touches 
particular individuals and imports a personal element 
into the debate, is, in a way, more interesting than 
the questions of the Bible, the Creed, and the Sacra- 
ments, it is not true that it is intrinsically more 
important than they. If those who have been criticis- 
ing the Bishops for what they " demand " in the fourth 
article would give a little time to considering what 
these same Bishops concede in the third, we should 
come, all of us, into calmer mood, besides attaining, 
or, let me say, because of our having attained, a truer 
perspective. 

But whether the Bishops of the Anglican Com- 
munion accomplish anything for unity or not, they 
are to be congratulated as theologians upon having 
taken in this matter of the sacraments a position 
which is intrinsically unassailable. 

Why should we expect to know more about the 
body spiritual than we can possibly pretend to know 
about the body natural ? Ecclesiology ought to be 
esteemed at least as difficult a study as Physiology. 
If Baptism be the sacrament of birth and Holy Com- 
munion the sacrament of nourishment, we surely ought 
not to complain if these phenomena of the spiritual 
order show themselves as little amenable to analyti- 
cal treatment as do the corresponding phenomena in 



APPENDIX. 91 

the natural order. No man, in the present state of 
our knowledge, so much as dreams of explaining the 
inner secrets of embryology and nutrition ; why then 
should we expect to understand, or why should we 
wish to force others into saying that they understand, 
how souls are born or how spirits are fed ? It is not 
first the spiritual and then the natural ; it is " first 
the natural and then the spiritual." We reverse the 
true order of the mind's progress when we grapple 
with the hardest problems first. If the day ever 
comes for us to understand all mysteries and all 
knowledge, we shall doubtless, along with other 
things, possess a complete philosophy of sacraments ; 
but perhaps by that time we shall have got beyond 
the need of sacraments. Lambeth, Geneva, Rome 
will all have been forgotten. 



92 APPENDIX. 



B. 



THE PLACE OF TEMPERAMENT IN 
RELIGION. 1 

The variety which characterizes men's attitudes 
in religion is probably in the main due to diverse 
methods of training. We think thus or so about 
creeds, sacraments, prayers, maxims of conduct, and 
the like, because we are brought up to think thus or 
so about them. But allowance must also be made for 
that mysterious background of every man's life which 
we know as his natural temperament. The ancient 
physicians went very deeply into this matter, or 
thought that they did, for they not only classified 
men according to their temperaments, but they 
insisted that the temperaments themselves were 
occasioned by certain humours fluent throughout the 
body, and by their presence there determining that 
one man should be " sanguine," another " choleric," 
or another " melancholy," as the case might be. 
This theory has been long dead, though the nomen- 
clature of it survives in the usages of common 
speech; and yet the doctrine of the four humours 

1 Extract from a Sermon preached before the Faculty and Students 
of the Divinity School at Philadelphia. 



APPENDIX. 93 

or temperaments may be said to have something 
that answers to it in the permanent constitution 
of human nature. As a matter of fact, there are 
four predominant ways of looking at things, four 
moods or tempers that always have prevailed and 
doubtless always will prevail to color the intercourse 
of man with man. There are born conservatives and 
born liberals ; nay, more than this, there are born 
liberal-conservatives and born conservative-liberals. 

These are the four temperaments. Get together 
any considerable number of people, and set them to 
discussing any question that touches upon human 
conduct, whether in the political or the social or the 
religious sphere, and every one of these several ways 
of looking at things will be found to be present and 
self-assertive. Under the names of " Right " and 
" Left," " Right-centre " and " Left-centre," these dis- 
tinctive phases of thought and feeling figure continu- 
ally in the political life of contemporary Europe. But 
although the names are modern, the things for which 
they stand are not. The fourfold classification is 
something more than a convenience ; it points to dif- 
ferences rooted in the nature of things. To a mind of 
the conservative cast, only such measures approve 
themselves as have been tried and tested. What is 
venerable is, because venerable, authentic ; newness 
is its own condemnation. " Thus saith the Lord, 
Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old 
paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and 
ye shall find rest for your souls." In tones so elo- 



94 APPENDIX. 

quent as these, and so persuasive, can Conservatism 
speak. 

But Liberalism is not less ready,, " Faith " is its 
watchword. Those, it reminds us, have been the he- 
roes and leaders of mankind who have had eyes given 
them to discern the undiscovered continents of truth ; 
who have cut loose from precedent and prescription, 
and have struck out courageously, forgetful of the 
past, and deaf to all old-time traditions, in the confi- 
dent belief that safety lay in motion, and that immo- 
bility meant death. Moreover, Liberalism can quote 
Scripture too. Are we not, it confidently asks, the 
children of a God who declares that He makes " all 
things new," and is not our best hand-book of religion 
a New Testament ? 

But over and above the minds distinctly conserva- 
tive and the minds distinctly liberal there are other 
minds so constituted that it is impossible for them not 
to recognize truth on both sides. They feel the charm, 
they admit the power, they know the value, of such 
things as ripeness and maturity ; but, at the same time, 
they recognize all about them evidence incontrovertible 
that man can and does better himself in a thousand 
ways by waiting upon the untried and thrusting out 
valiantly into the deep. Of this intermediate multi- 
tude one half, let us say, grafts its faith in the new 
upon its confidence in the old, while the other half 
grafts its respect for the old upon its enthusiasm for 
the new. To the liberal conservative the old is his 
stand-by, the new is his half-grudging concession. To 



APPENDIX. 95 

the conservative-liberal the new is his heart's desire, 
while the old is something which he has learned that 
it is dangerous to leave out of the account. These are 
the four temperaments of man, and of these is the 
whole earth overspread. What I have been describing 
is no accident of the passing century, no special char- 
acteristic of one race or people rather than another ; 
it is a law of variation inbred in humanity as such. 
We are born so. 

The religious and ecclesiastical results of tempera- 
ment make an interesting study. The three great 
territorial divisions of the Church are her doctrine, 
her governance, and her worship. She is here on earth 
to teach, to shepherd, and to pray. The soul of man 
needs to be instructed, it needs to be sympathized with, 
it needs to be uplifted. Upon the Church's shoulders 
rests the duty of meeting this threefold need : she 
must make disciples, she must gather these disciples 
into a flock, she must lead the flock in the green 
pastures of devotion. As visible symbols, concrete 
emblems of this triple ministry, we have the pulpit, 
the pastoral staff, the altar ; these concrete tokens 
help us to understand and appreciate the abstract 
terms, doctrine, discipline, and worship. 

But the point to be especially emphasized is this — 
that when the four temperaments of man are brought 
into contact and connection with the three forms of 
the Church's activity, there ensue combinations so 
various and so intricate that the futility as well as the 
injustice of our current partisan vocabulary is made 



96 APPENDIX. 

manifest at once. Take doctrine, for instance, and 
consider how delicately shaded off, one into another, 
are the differences that divide men in the Church. 

The conservative is all for the "faith once deliv- 
ered," " the sacred deposit," " the Catholic Creed." 
He insists, and insists rightly, that Christianity is 
what it is in virtue of certain disclosures made to 
man at definite epochs in history. He maintains, 
and maintains justly, that unless Christ's religion 
brings us a clearly articulated message with respect 
to subjects about which we should otherwise have 
remained ignorant to the end of time, we are no 
better off than the heathen, who may, if they choose, 
guess at truth as well as we. 

On the other hand, the liberal makes much of a 
certain prophetic succession which is, to his mind, 
quite as important as any apostolic succession possibly 
can be to other minds. Why should we believe, he 
asks, that progress in the attainment of spiritual 
knowledge stopped short at the close of the first cen- 
tury, or, if not so soon as that, then on the day of the 
adjournment of the last of " the undisputed general 
councils " ? Did not Christ promise his disciples the 
assistance of an ever-present spiritual Revealer who 
should guide them, little by little, into all the truth ? 
So, then, the fresher any man's theology, and the 
more nearly up to date, the better. But " Stop ! 
Stop ! " cries the conservative-liberal ; " this will 
never do. I grant you that ships are given sails 
in order that they may stand out to sea, trusting 



APPENDIX. 97 

themselves to the winds of God ; but they are also 
equipped with anchors ; and while I am willing and 
glad to start off with you on your voyage of discovery, 
I refuse to step on board until you show me some evi- 
dence of your having made provision against gales." 
While — last and wisest of them all — the liberal-con- 
servative insists that neither is " fixity of interpreta- 
tion " nor yet laxity of interpretation really " of the 
essence of the Creed," but that what is of its essence 
is a certain marvellous adaptability, whereby it comes 
to pass that the articles of the faith are never nega- 
tived, but only given a fuller, deeper, and more satis- 
fying signification, the faster the great Father of 
Lights lets more light be poured down into this dim 
world of his. Copernicus did not annul the first 
paragraph of the Creed by what he proved, Newton 
laid no violent hand upon the second, Lavoisier caused 
no hiatus in the third ; but the words " Maker of 
heaven and earth," the words " He ascended into 
heaven," and the words " the Eesurrection of the 
body," have meant more to intelligent believers since 
these three men made their discoveries than they 
meant before. That is what the liberal-conservative 
has to say about it, — the man who believes in the 
past, but not so stupidly as to keep his eyes fast shut 
to anything that God may be revealing in the present. 
It is easy to see that in the field of governance the 
conservative will naturally favor whatever makes for 
continuity of control, for regularity in the transmis- 
sion of authority, and in general for what we know 

7 



98 APPENDIX. 

as legitimacy; that the liberal, on the other hand, 
will smile approvingly on new methods of adminis- 
tration, and, so that men make full proof of their minis- 
try by showing themselves successful in the conversion 
of souls to God, will deprecate too close a scrutiny of 
ecclesiastical pedigrees ; that the conservative-liberal 
will say : tt Oh yes, I like this spiritual freedom ; but 
would n't it be prudent to draw the line somewhere ? " 
and that the liberal-conservative will respond : " Yes, 
certainly, the line must be drawn ; but let us make it 
just as inclusive as ever we conscientiously can. The 
one sin which God Almighty will never forgive to any 
portion of his Church is the sin of want of sympathy." 
And then, again, there is worship. We can have 
little doubt as to how the men of the different tem- 
peraments will stand affected towards that. With the 
conservative it will be the rubric, the whole rubric, 
and nothing but the rubric ; with the liberal it will be 
what he laxly calls " the rubric of common-sense." 
The conservative-liberal will declare that he loves a 
simple, unaffected, and, as it were, spontaneous ren- 
dering of divine service, while yet he does not see 
why it should not be enriched a little and made digni- 
fied by the old traditional methods ; while the liberal- 
conservative will argue that, supposing those who are 
attached to the old ways in all their oldness are not 
only allowed to have them, but are given guarantees 
that they shall never be molested in their enjoyment 
of them, he cannot, for the life of him, understand 
why Anglicans should refuse Church fellowship to 



APPENDIX. 99 

congregations of Christian folk who are ready for 
their polity, but not quite ready for all the details 
of their liturgy. 

It might at first sight appear, from what has been 
said, as if Churchmen might all be classified — if 
classified they must be — under four heads ; but no, 
the thing is far from being so simple as all this, seeing 
that various cross-combinations are possible, conser- 
vatism itself seeming to one conservative to demand 
that he differ from his brother conservative in mat- 
ters of worship while agreeing with him in questions 
of polity, and that he agree with another on points of 
polity while differing with him widely in his view of 
dogma. 

Instead, therefore, of only four varieties of Church- 
manship, there may conceivably be it is difficult to 
say how many. And what is the just inference from 
such a conclusion ? Is it not this, — that since all 
these manifold types of character do, as a matter 
of fact, already co-exist amicably enough within the 
limits of a single historic Church, there is no reason, 
in the nature of things, why that Church should not 
become far more truly an American Church than it 
can truthfully boast of being now ? 

Already Anglican religion is in theory hospitable 
and inclusive; it remains for us of this new world, 
acting under the guidance and blessing of Him who, 
doubtless for cause, led our fathers hither, to see 
whether we cannot translate theory into fact. 



100 APPENDIX. 



c. 



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